12
It was the greatest mistake of his life, and he had no one but himself to blame. Sitting with his arms folded across his knees beside an equally baffled and speechless Abernathy in the Rivermont Hotel, he stared, his face squeezed shut, at televised scenes of bloodshed and civil breakdown on the downtown streets of Memphis. He’d been out there just minutes before, leading a crowd of six thousand down Main Street from the Clayborn Temple to protest the city’s blatantly racist treatment of black sanitation workers. They’d marched all of three blocks before he heard glass breaking in clothing stores behind him. Turning, he saw black teenagers, some wearing stocking caps to hold their processed hair in place, pillaging shoes and suitcoats priced at $89.95 through plate-glass windows, then the police moving toward them, and he’d cried out, “Stop this, I won’t lead a violent march,” but it was too late. Evil was free. To save his life aides pulled him into a passing car, sped through the police barricades, and delivered him, not back to the black-owned and — operated Lorraine Motel, but to a deluxe hotel in a white neighborhood overlooking the Mississippi.
“God Almighty, we waltzed right into this one,” Abernathy’s eyes watered as he watched cops with butchwax crewcuts driving elderly black demonstrators in raincoats from the empty streets onto sidewalks, where they pinned them to the pavement, jamming their knees into the backs of anyone who resisted. “Why the devil didn’t somebody do their homework before we got here?”
“Ralph, you’ve got to get me out of Memphis.”
“Soon,” Abernathy said. “As soon as we can settle things here.”
“I don’t think I can take any more—”
“Tomorrow. We’ve got a flight in the morning.”
“Ralph …”
“Yes?”
“Am I doing any good?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
In the next room the phone was ringing. There was pounding on the hotel’s door. From what he could tell, the hallway was filled with people. James Lawson’s folks, no doubt. And reporters — they were always at his heels, asking him to comment on everything colored men did on this earth, or analyze every new political development, forever asking him for answers, predictions, opinions. In his youth, right out of B. U., he had four answers for any question the media posed to him. Fifteen years later what he wanted most for himself — for Martin — was a brief withdrawal, a retreat for meditation and reflection. But now they had a bona fide catastrophe, one with his name attached to it. One they could say destroyed his beliefs forever.
Abernathy let his head fall back on the sofa; he stared at the white ceiling. Then, abruptly, he said, “ML, you’ve got to talk to them.”
His insides were shaking. Brackish fluids from his belly kept climbing up his throat, and he kept swallowing to force down the backwash. The room was swimming. It felt wrong, all of it. Outside the window of his two-bedroom suite, in a garden that made him think of Gethsemane, trees were leaved lusciously, the quiet was broken only by songbirds while downtown the police were painting the streets with blood. He clamped shut his eyes. Now he understood the meaning of Paul’s words, “I die daily.”
“Not now …”
“You want me to run interference?”
“Please, I can’t see anybody right now.” His voice shook. “Buy me some time.”
Abernathy gave him a pat on his shoulder, then pulled his suitcoat off the back of the chair, slipped his arms through the sleeves, adjusted his tie, and went to answer the door. Once Abernathy was gone, he threw up on the sofa. Then he put his head in his trembling hands and cried until he felt clean. He’d wept often and easily in 1967, trailing tears across a continent, from Atlanta to Washington, from New York to Marks, Mississippi, where in preparation for the ambitious Poor People’s Campaign he’d interviewed black tenant workers with teeth colored like Indian corn. In their tin-roofed shacks he saw barefoot children, their stomachs bloated, wearing clothes woven from dirt: babies living in conditions as miserable as those of the Untouchables in India, but Gandhi had given them a different title, Harijans (“children of God”), and the government officials he and Coretta met were sincere in their commitment to programs aimed at alleviating the suffering of a class it had despised and oppressed for centuries. If there, he wondered, then why not in the wealthiest nation in the world? If America had done so many special things to suppress Negroes, why couldn’t it do something special for them? Other ministers, black and white — particularly white ones from rich churches — reminded him that when Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, a woman brought him costly fragrant oil, which set his disciples to complaining, “To what purpose is this waste when the ointment might have been sold for much and given to the poor,” and to this Jesus replied, “Ye shall have the poor always with you.” Indeed, white preachers cited this often; they were the ones he chastised in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” and to them he replied with a passage of his own: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” But the words of Christ were the horn of his salvation. Poverty would always exist, he knew that. Prejudice, so hydra-headed, could never entirely be eliminated. He knew that too; but no piety from the pages of Scripture could ever justify the fact that the world’s suffering poor in the modern era were predominantly black and brown, women and children.
Later that night, as he drank to dull the pain in his mouth (he’d ground down on his teeth and crushed a filling), he watched baton-wielding motorcycle policemen, jackbooted and jacketed, wade into black rioters on Main Street. Three thousand National Guardsmen and a phalanx of olive-green tanks and trucks rumbled like thunder into town, imposing a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Reports coming through the television told of two hundred eighty arrested, sixty-two clubbed and wounded, and one sixteen-year-old boy killed. No matter what anyone said, that death was on his soul. His critics were right — sometimes he was a damned poor organizer. But how could he oversee everything? Be everywhere at once? He felt he was caught in a current sweeping him relentlessly forward, one in which he was drowning, unable to catch his breath or keep his head above water as the waves propelled him helplessly on like a man hurtling over Niagara Falls. Abernathy ordered from room service but could not get him to touch a thing on the tray. Or speak, for he felt dim in understanding, weak in flesh, and cold in his heart.
He paced the turquoise carpeted floors of their hotel room in his stocking feet, thinking of that dead teenage boy, blowing cigarette smoke, his collar open and sweat-stained, retracing every step that had directed him away from the prodigious work of preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign, with its impossible logistics, to leading this tragic march for the sanitation workers. At first, their problems with Mayor Henry Loeb seemed peripheral to the Movement and did not draw his attention until the day, February 12, when thirteen hundred black workers went on strike after the city refused to recognize their union and rejected its demands for a ten percent wage increase and benefits. They marched, wearing and carrying signs proclaiming “I AM a Man.” Negroes in the Memphis community rallied behind the strikers, who now and then skirmished with the police. They listened to civil rights leaders at Mason Temple Church urge them not to return to their jobs before their demands were met. Mayor Loeb’s response was to dig in, refusing to talk to their representatives, and he promised to fire all the strikers. The city brought forth an injunction to halt demonstrations on the workers behalf. Local ministers decided there was only one man who could shore up their battle against Loeb, whom blacks had hugely voted against during his campaign for office.