Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 16

We've decided to stay in Selma. Tomorrow afternoon, there's a reenactment of the march to the Pettus Bridge, and tonight, at the local performing arts theatre, there is something billed as Selma Looking Back, Moving Forward. We talked about moving on. Maybe there'll be some celebrations in Georgia, too, I suggested.

"Not like this," Wayne said, his voice hushed.

Wayne is not given to awe. His mind is quick, but dark. In Jackson, he stood at the fringe of the parade as if his joints had been wired too tightly together. Last night, after dinner at a Mexican restaurant where the clientele was both white and black, he balked at taking a shortcut through an alley to what looked like a park.

"What are you afraid of?" I asked, knowing the answer. Confrontation. Authority. A bullet in his back.

"Your kind is selected against," he warned wryly. "Guys like me survive. We avoid dark alleys."

"Lamarckian!" I accused.

"Maybe you're right," he admitted, and we walked down the alley to the park, which turned out to be a parking lot. I'm still not sure who got the last laugh.

"You know," he says now as we have our coffee on the terrace, watching the yellowhammers flit among the shrubs on the riverbank, "there's nothing to be afraid of. It's as safe here as anywhere."

WE ARRIVE at the performing arts theatre early. The full t.i.tle of the evening's entertainment is Selma Looking Back, Moving Forward: Commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King. We should have known something was up by the "Jr." missing from his name. No true Yellowhammer ever makes that mistake.

A fresh-faced young white man with blond hair and a wide, gummy grin steps up to greet us in the lobby. He is wearing a Freedom Foundation T-s.h.i.+rt.

"Welcome," he says, thrusting his hand at my chest.

"What's the Freedom Foundation?" I ask, thinking of Freedom Corner, of King's dream.

"We're from Denver, Colorado. We're here to work for reconciliation and renewal. We do counselling, for families and couples, communities."

"Reconciliation along racial lines, you mean?"

"Yes." The ebullient facade s.h.i.+fts. His face is earnest now. "There is still a lot of healing to be done here."

"And you've come from Colorado to do it?"

The sparkle returns. "Yes, we have!"

The auditorium has been beautifully restored. On the stage, a bare-bones rock band is flanked by rows of teenagers wearing blue jeans and Freedom Foundation T-s.h.i.+rts. Of the sixty or so young people in the choir, only three are black, but they are in the front row. They look slightly dazed, as if they've been pulled in off the street at the last minute to provide a little local colour. The audience is spa.r.s.e, more than half white. I'm horrified that I've started to see the world this way, two-toned.

Two singers come forward to start the evening, a young black woman with a voice like Aretha Franklin, and a thin, anxious-looking white girl who sings in a high-pitched whine and slaps her blue-jeaned thigh not quite with the beat. They try to belt out old Sixties tunes, all the "Baby!"s changed to "Lord!"s. Someone clicks on a ghetto blaster and a young black girl in a diaphanous white robe does an Isadora Duncan routine to "The Impossible Dream." A white boy named Robert reads a piece about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, repeating one paragraph of the original, which is genuinely moving. Then the guest speaker, Cheyenne Webb, comes on to tell us how the civil rights martyr changed her life. I struggle to feel something, but she keeps getting in the way, referring again and again to Reverend Mark, the white Billy Graham clone sitting in the front row.

"You spoke like King, you reminded me of King. You are," she says, "the reincarnation of King."

I WAKE the next morning still angry. What we were lured into last night was not the commemoration of a great man but a tent meeting, a group of fundamentalist Christians trying to convert a town in which there is already a church on every corner. I can't help wondering why they picked this place. Because it looks good on the letterhead to have a Freedom Foundation with a ministry in Selma, Alabama?

We go out for a bird walk and see trees full of cardinals and cedar waxwings and one Carolina wren. We ask Veronica at the desk to recommend a breakfast spot, then get caught up reading a plaque devoted to the Reverend James Reeb, the white minister who answered a call by Dr. King to come help in Selma. After eating at a black cafe, he took a wrong turn and ended up near a white club, the Silver Moon, where he was beaten. He later died from a fractured skull.

We spend part of the day at the National Voting Rights Museum. Sam, who greets us, explains that the museum is a people's project, the story of all the "regular folks" who made the movement what it was. One entire wall-the "I Was There" wall-is feathered with Post-it note messages from people who were at the b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday march, at the Selma to Montgomery march, at all the other marches without names.

I was seven months pregnant on the bridge on b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday. A trooper who saw that I was pregnant deliberately tried to run me down with his horse.

I was beaten on the bridge.

I was a State Trooper in 1965.

I have no words to express. It's all on the inside of my heart and it hurts.

The next room is panelled with FBI and police photographs chronicling the marchers, defiant as they first approach the bridge, grim as they walk to Montgomery flanked by National Guardsmen charged with clearing the bridges of bombs, the woods of snipers. (They found nothing, but at least they kept the spitters, rock throwers, and insult hurlers at a distance.) In the centre are the plaster footprints and shoes of those who made the walk. In another room, the plain sweater, cloth shoes, and rolled nylons of Marie Foster, who walked the entire fifty miles, never once accepting a rest ride. Everywhere, photos of King and excerpts from his speeches. A white girl vacuums a corner where a KKK exhibit is a work-in-progress. In the tiny gift shop, reproduction signs are for sale-White Only and Colored-and cotton bags: "Hands That Pick Cotton Can Pick Presidents."

"We should get one."

"No," Wayne says flatly in a tone that tells me not to press it.

The museum is housed in the former meeting place of the White Citizens Committee, formed by the owners of businesses and factories, bank managers and bosses who decided together that if a black man tried to register for the vote, his services would no longer be needed, his house was no longer available to rent.

I ask Sam, "How did they justify it? What did they tell themselves?"

A white woman standing nearby snorts. "The same things they said to themselves about women when they refused them the vote."

"A lot of people thought, we get the vote, everything will change," Sam says. "It wasn't like that. It's still not like that." He tells us about Sheriff Clark, who is now in a nursing home. Sam visited him a few months ago. "'I was just doing my job,' that's what he told me," Sam says. "'I could have arrested a lot more and I didn't.'"

Sam reports the conversation without judgment. "Everyone is part of this story," he says. "We want all of it here."

"They should have a portrait of York here," Wayne says as we leave. "William Clark's slave in 1805. He was the first black man to vote in America. Then again," he adds, "there probably is no portrait of York."

All day we've been trying to find out about tomorrow's parade to the bridge. Veronica laughs every time I ask. She stands with her back slightly arched, as if ready at any minute to lift her face to the sun, which she does when she laughs, which is very often. At one point, I ask if she has Sat.u.r.day's paper; maybe there was a mention of the time and gathering place there.

"Oh, we don't have no Sat'day paper," she laughs. "Sunday we have. By Sat'day ever'body already knows what's goin' on."

Everybody but us.

I ask the housekeeper when she comes to change the bed linen. I can't shake the feeling that maybe the reason no one will tell us when the parade starts is that we're not wanted there.

"Are others welcome at the parade?" I ask tentatively.

"Why, sure."

"I mean, it's your celebration. Re-enactment, I mean."

"Oh," she says, as if she's never thought of it like that before.

"I was just a white girl up in Canada, but it meant a lot to me."

"It did, it did," she nods. "It changed everything."

She pauses to pa.s.s a hand over the bedspread, which does not need smoothing. There is no smile in her eyes, no warmth in her voice.

"Y'all come," she says finally. "Everybody's welcome. We've had enough of that other."

WALTER Hill, the guest speaker at Tabernacle Baptist Church, is a thin, intense black man from nearby Mosses, Alabama. According to the program handed to me as I entered the church, he is a native of Chicago who moved to this state when he was twelve, "received his baccalaureate degree from Miles College, and is now matriculating at Alabama State University in Educational Policy and Leaders.h.i.+p." There are about thirty people in the congregation, including a half-dozen of the white do-gooders from Denver we saw at the revival meeting last night. We sit as far from them as we can get. There is an all-male choir at the front of the church. A succession of speakers has mounted the low dais in front of the choir to address us, each of them veterans of the 1965 march. The presiding pastor, Roosevelt Goldsby, has announced the theme of the day's service: "Remembering the Man and the Legend," the man, of course, being Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When Mr. Ronald Peoples has read the scripture, Samuel C. Lett has led us in prayer, and Mrs. Doris c.o.x has explained the significance to the voters' rights movement of Tabernacle First Baptist, where both of the historic marches began and where in March 1965 hundreds of black protesters gathered despite the local bylaw prohibiting more than three blacks to a.s.semble to talk about civil rights, Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson introduces Walter Hill and Hill's topic, "Pharaoh, Let My People Go."

This is the first church service I've attended since my father died, and my first Baptist service ever, although my grandfather and grandmother both had "Baptist" on their wedding licence. Having been raised Anglican, with all the pomp and liturgy that entailed, I like the informality of the Baptist meeting. It isn't abas.e.m.e.nt to an absentee G.o.d: no one kneels in a Baptist church. It isn't self-congratulatory adherence to an abstract concept of superiority. There is a strong sense of community, of openness, of shared interests and concerns, natural, I suppose, among a people who know they have been more sinned against than sinning. "The pressing duty before the Negro ministry," wrote black journalist James Weldon Johnson in 1917, in an editorial in the New York Sun, "is to take the power of the Negro Church and make it an instrument for bettering the conditions of the race . . . It is time," he continued, "to put the Negro Church into close touch with the practical questions that affect the welfare of the Negro people as citizens."

Walter Hill doesn't seem old enough to have been born in 1965, but he is a powerful speaker. Imagine a Southern Baptist version of the sermon that begins James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Brother Hill isn't wearing robes or a surplice, he's wearing a plain black suit with a white s.h.i.+rt and tie, as are all the men in the church except me. And he is not telling us that we should be humble and penitent; he is telling us that we should be vigilant, that there are problems in the black community that need to be addressed if the struggle for freedom is to be carried on into the next generation.

"The Egyptian Pharaoh held the Israelites captive in Egypt and put them to work as slaves, turning the barren flood plains of the Nile River into plantations to feed the rich landowners, building the great pyramids to house the remains of the kings of the land. Moses said to him, 'Pharaoh, let my people go,' and when the Egyptian Pharaoh refused, Moses led the Children of Israel himself out of that place of bondage, out of that land of prejudice and segregation, toward the Promised Land."

There are murmurs of a.s.sent among the congregation. No one is missing the parallels.

"The Egyptian Pharaoh is supposed to have drowned in the Red Sea, whose waters parted to allow the pa.s.sage of the Israelites but closed again to prevent their pursuit by Pharaoh and his soldiers. And so the Children of Israel reached the Promised Land.

"But there are new pharaohs today, pharaohs to be fought against with as much determination as the Israelites fought against the Egyptian Pharaoh. Today's pharaohs are keeping our people in bondage just as surely as that earlier pharaoh kept the Children of Israel in slavery. Who are these modern-day pharaohs?"

"You tell us, Brother Hill."

"The Pharaoh of Drugs!"

"Yes!"

"The Pharaoh of Dropouts!"

"Oh, yes!"

"And the Pharaoh of I-Don't-Care!"

"Praise the Lord!"

Modern black youth, Brother Hill tells the congregation, are undoing many of the gains made by the civil rights movement of the 1960s-through drug abuse and drug warfare, lack of education, and indifference. It isn't a sermon, it's a talk, and I find myself listening attentively. The clock is turning backwards, he says. It's time to stop fighting among and against ourselves and give new life to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of a Promised Land.

When Brother Hill is finished, the male choir sings its last spiritual, and most of the congregation, including the bevy of young Denverites, threads its way out of the church to line up for the march. But a few of us, maybe a dozen, including Merilyn and me, hang back. When the doors open, we can hear the high school marching band warming up in the rain, Sam moving up and down the line, organizing the march. Those of us still in the church are invited to join a woman at the front, who explains that in March of 1965, before setting out from this church on the walk to Montgomery, King led the people of Tabernacle First Baptist in singing "We Shall Overcome." And we are going to sing it now, before the Dream March, because although we have come a long way since 1965, there is still a long road ahead. We stand in a circle and join hands. I am between Merilyn and an elderly white-haired man who looks at me and smiles. There are tears in his eyes. I smile back and take his hand, and together, haltingly at first but with increasing conviction, we sing.

WE JOIN the line in the rain behind the high school band, resplendent in their royal blue gold-braided uniforms under transparent plastic raincoats. Sam patrols up and down the sidewalk. He wants everything to go right, although there doesn't seem to be much of a plan other than to walk from here down Broad Street to the bridge. "Follow the band," he tells us, and when it starts up, we do. Merilyn and I have no umbrella, but a man beside us holds his over the three of us. He says he's come all the way from Chicago for this march; his parents were in the first two, and he is here in their memory. He doesn't ask us why we're here, and I wonder what I would say if he did: that I'm here to atone for my father's repudiation of his African-American blood? To a.s.suage my guilt at never having lifted a finger in defence of civil liberty?

We have a police escort; white cops stand at each intersection along Broad Street, keeping a lane clear for us. Store owners, some black and some white, come out onto the sidewalk to cheer us along. Drivers honk their horns. Sam shouts at them: "All right, all right!" We wave and they wave back. We are part of a knot of walkers as we pa.s.s the Mom & Pop Easy Travel, Ray's Jewelry Repair, Rexall Drugs, Meemaw's Treasures, and Cahara Furn, which sells "Robes and gowns, Christian books, gifts, Christian supplies." On the sidewalk outside the store is a sandwich board with the information that Edgar Cayce worked in these premises from 1912 to 1923. "Many psychic readings were given in the back room," it says. I wonder if he foresaw this.

The band is playing a spirited march, the majorettes high-stepping, their white knee-high boots splas.h.i.+ng down on the rain-soaked pavement. We stroll along behind them, keeping our distance from the Denverites, not one of whom put a nickel in the collection plate.

A young woman in a long, flowing African-print coat falls into step beside us. She's a lawyer, she tells us, just come from the county jail where her client, a young black man, was charged with parole violation for being drunk.

"He wasn't drunk," she says, "he has diabetes. He was sick. He was trying to get to the hospital. The d.a.m.ned police officer just a.s.sumed he was drunk and brought him in. The judge wouldn't even let me speak in my client's defence. Told me to shut the h.e.l.l up. When I refused, she had me arrested."

We'd seen her in the church. When the route of the march was announced, she stood up and said, "To the jail! We should be going to the jail! Do you think Dr. King would let a whole meeting pa.s.s and never mention that a young black man was being unjustly held? Are we just going through the motions here, remembering something way back when?"

"I thought things had changed some," Merilyn says to her.

"Oh, they changed all right," she says bitterly. "The judge was a black woman."

At the bridge, the band swings left onto Water Street and stands marking time while the walkers mill around, unsure of where to go. Sam says a few words about the 1965 march, then another man takes the microphone and introduces the lawyer we've been talking to.

"When that woman was arrested for contempt of court, they searched her," the man says, "and they found a concealed weapon. You know what it was? Her voice. That's what they wrote down. Concealed weapon: voice."

He pa.s.ses the mike to the lawyer, who begins to tell the story of her young client. The band moves off; people disperse to their homes. Her voice becomes more and more desperate. "No one says anything because we have a black mayor and a black chief of police. But I don't care whether your skin is black or red or white or green. Injustice is injustice."

Merilyn and I stay and listen, and in the end she is speaking only to us. I don't think she recognizes us. She tells us again about the black judge and the overzealous cop.

"And do you know what that cop's name was?" she asks us.

We shake our heads.

"I could hardly believe it," she says, shaking her head, too. "He was a white man, and his name was Jim Crow."

12 / ATHENS, GEORGIA.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama, is bigger than Selma, but in at least one respect it is no different from Selma or Jackson or El Paso or dozens of other cities we've seen across America-it is empty at its core.

In Jackson, when we left Freedom Corner, we headed downtown, thinking we'd find a good restaurant, maybe a bookstore. We asked a policeman how to find the city centre.

"Take Bailey. That'll get y'all there."

We drove down Bailey, which followed some railroad tracks and a line of low warehouses. Then we turned on Pearl toward a tall building that had had all its windows blown out. We eventually found the state capitol building, the ubiquitous imposing courthouse, the library, but the wide streets around them were empty of cars, the sidewalks deserted, many shop windows, too. No restaurants. Definitely no bookstores.

"Go down Galatin," one man offered, so we tried that, circling back on our trail.

"Do you know how we can get downtown?" Wayne asked the pa.s.senger in the car next to ours at a red light. Wayne never asks for directions. This had to mean we were well and truly lost.

"Thetaway," said the fellow, pointing the way we'd come.

After an hour, we still had not found anything that fit our definition of downtown: shops, cafes, theatres, bookstores, a little street life. All we saw were empty, windblown streets, boarded-up buildings, and traffic lights changing incessantly for no one.

"There must be a heart to this city," I insisted. "We're just not looking in the right place."

Back on the highway, we pa.s.sed mall after mall, their parking lots full of cars. When we left Mississippi and crossed into Alabama, we drove through one town after another, their centres gutted and vacant, here and there a shop set up in a building of faded glory, a truck with a mobile yard sale, a rack of clothes installed under the awning of a disembowelled gas station. And always, somewhere on the outskirts, a glaring strip of oversized box stores.

In Selma, the downtown streets were four lanes wide. Lovely antebellum buildings stood boarded up, plate gla.s.s windows cracked and taped. Signs for bail bonds and quick cash for income tax refunds outnumbered stores with necessary goods for sale. When I asked Veronica, at the hotel, where she shopped, she jerked her head north.

"Out the highway," she said.

Selma has a population of 33,000. There are no city buses.

"So you have to have a car?" I asked.

"Yes ma'am," Veronica replied. "Or hire yo'self a taxicab."

If the government oppresses you, you can march to Montgomery, but what do you do when Walmart has you in chains?