Sermon and speech, politics and parables all mixed into an unimaginably potent recipe for change; a plea for justice in a new future that was within America’s grasp if only it had the courage to grasp it with both hands.
“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the mount with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the genuine discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, pray together; to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom forever, knowing that we will be free one day.”
We will be free one day!
Dwayne felt drunk with the possibilities of the moment.
“And I say to you today my friends, let freedom ring. From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring. From the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring. From the mighty Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snow capped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only there; let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill in Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
Afterwards, Dwayne John could never explain why he did what he did next. One instant he was transported into what amounted to an altered state of mind by the timbre and the hypnotic call of Martin Luther King’s voice; the next he was bracing himself.
“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we're free at last!’”
There were gasps, screams and then utter Bedlam as the huge, bear-like frame of Dwayne John enveloped, staggered and crashed Dr Martin Luther King to the hard, unyielding boards of the stage.
In the immediate aftermath nobody could recollect whether there had been three or four faint, very distant reports of a rifle barking.
In those awful moments the only thing anybody knew for sure was that around the microphone stands where Dr Martin Luther King had been delivering his call for national redemption; bodies now lay in spreading pools of livid, cardinal blood in the bright afternoon sunshine.
And several women were screaming.
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Book 3: The Great Society. I hope you enjoyed it — or if you didn’t, sorry — but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
The sequel to The Great Society, and the fourth book in the Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series titled Ask Not of Your Country will be published on 31st December 2016.
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like to briefly — well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse — share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World and where I am coming from with the series.
What is alternative history? How can ‘counterfactuals’ help us better understand the reality of the world in which we live? These are confounding questions which for all their intractability lend themselves to endless possibilities.
One strap line for the Timeline 10/27/62 Series is that ‘the swinging sixties never happened’. Okay, the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong but in this timeline Britain was hard hit but not wiped off the face of the earth; so why did the swinging sixties in some way, shape or form not happen?
To me that question has a relatively simple answer. London got nuked and the Beatles never went to America.
The Great Society ends on Friday 7th February 1964; in our actual, that is, real timeline that was the day that the Beatles arrived in America for the first time. In the Timeline 10/27/62 World the Beatles disappeared in the ruins of their home city Liverpool.
On 27th October 1962 — the night of the War — the Beatles were appearing live at the Hulme Hall in Birkenhead. Co-incidentally, it was also the night they gave their first radio interview, for Radio Clatterbridge a station broadcasting to two local hospitals. The Beatles had not yet ‘happened’. Beatlemania was still some months away in early 1963. It was only three weeks after the release of the band’s first single ‘Love me Do’ and even locally on Merseyside, at that time the Beatles were hardly known to the general public beyond the circle of the regulars at the Cavern Club and other small venues in the area.
The Cuban Missiles War snuffed out the Beatles as it did the contemporary ‘London scene’; and there was to be no ‘swinging sixties’.
I think drama, literature and much of what we might call ‘art’ is about ‘what if?’ Human kind expresses its sentience through imagination, and in daring to dream impossible things. But from whence this imagination and will to dream comes I do not know.
However, I think — it would be overstating it to claim ‘I know’ — more or less from which well of imagination that Timeline 10/27/62 springs.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realized my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in the daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but didn’t know until much later that the most important moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of the United States of America. I didn’t know then that he was a womanising, drug addicted and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency, but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta — hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships — had been gunned down that day in Dallas.