FROM THE JUKEBOX, DAVID RUFFIN’S VOICE, ALL YEARNING and sweetness, faded out over a cascade of harmony and a swirl of violins. “Talkin’ ’bout my girl,” he sang. There was a pregnant silence. And then, sure enough, there came the now familiar wash of strings and horns rising to meet the soft, solemn rumble of a bass drum, and Sam Cooke—shockingly murdered in some seedy Los Angeles motel just three months ago—filled the café with keening lament, singing of a change long forestalled.
“But I know, a change gon’ come,” he prophesied.
Lester, who had predicted this, grinned and spread his hands in a gesture that said I told you so. Reverend Porter nodded and smiled, and George chuckled dutifully as “A Change Is Gonna Come” played for the fourth time in the half an hour they had been sitting there. Not that any of the New York ministers minded. Not that any of the other diners, packed elbow to elbow in the little Negro café, seemed to mind, either. A song of resilience and the promise of ultimate victory felt appropriate to the moment—indeed, necessary to the moment—a soundtrack well suited to disappointed people at the end of a disappointing day some had already taken to calling “turnaround Tuesday.”
“So,” said George, “now what?”
The three Bethel ministers were gathered around a table containing the remains of their feast: bones from pig’s feet, fried chicken and oxtails, a smattering of hog maws, hoppin’ John, and collard greens. Lester, who was born in Harlem and had never ventured further south than Philadelphia, had contented himself with a cheeseburger and French fries.
Porter’s smile was rueful. “I suppose that’s what we’ll find out at the meeting,” he replied, prompting George to glance at his watch. King had asked participants in that day’s march to gather at Brown Chapel at seven thirty. It was six fifty-four.
“Well, I hear they’re going to court to get the injunction lifted,” said Lester. “I hope they’re able to. And I hope we’re able to stay and see it through. We came all the way down here to accomplish something. I don’t like the idea of leaving with the job half done.”
“I quite agree,” said Porter. “Let’s just play it by ear for now. See how the Lord leads us.”
Lester’s nod was noncommittal. He made a show of picking disconsolately at his French fries. “Can’t say I’m much impressed by the local cuisine,” he said. The modest café was, they had been told, the only place nearby that served Negroes.
George was about to defend the honor of Southern cooking when a finger tapped his shoulder. He turned and found himself looking up into the bespectacled face of the white preacher from Boston he had met that afternoon on the housing project lawn. He tried to remember the man’s name, then realized he’d never learned it. “Sorry to interrupt you all,” the newcomer said with a friendly smile and a nod that took in the whole table. And then, to George: “I was remembering what you said earlier, about housing programs. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but there’s a pilot anti-poverty program being launched by the federal government that you should probably look into. It’s a public-private partnership, part of Johnson’s Great Society. I’ve already applied, but I remember the administrator telling me how disappointed they were to get so few applications from the New York and New Jersey area. You said your church is in Harlem, right?”
“Our church,” corrected George, gesturing to include Lester and Reverend Porter. “But yes.”
“Well, I’m sure they’d welcome your application. Why don’t you walk back over with me and my friends? I can give you the details. That is, if you gentlemen don’t mind letting me borrow him for a moment.”
“By all means,” said Porter with an open-handed gesture. “We’ll see you at the chapel, Reverend Simon.”
“Save me a seat,” said George. He stood, dropping three singles on the table, and accompanied the other man. He extended his hand as they moved toward the door.
“By the way,” he said, “I’m George.”
“Jim,” the other man said, and they shook. Sam Cooke was reaching the end of his song as they passed through the door—“Oh yes, it will,” he sang of the coming change he would not live to see—and sure enough, the record began all over again.
“Somebody in there really likes that song,” said Jim with a smile.
“Well,” said George, “it catches the mood. You’ve got to give it that.”
Two more men—Jim’s friends, George realized—joined them on the sidewalk. “Give me just a second, fellows,” said Jim, pointing to a nearby phone booth. “I should call my wife and let her know I’ve decided to stay on an extra day.”
George waited with the other two men—Clark and Orloff, they said their names were—while Jim made his call. Seeing him standing there in the lighted booth with the receiver to his ear reminded George that he should probably call his own wife. He checked his watch and decided he would do so after the meeting.
After a moment, Jim finished his call and rejoined them. The men walked north, which put the river at their backs. This raised a faint alarm in George. “Are you sure this is the right way?” he asked. “My friends and I, we came from the other direction.”
Clark tapped his watch. “The meeting begins at seven thirty,” he said. “Want to make sure we get good seats, and this is a little shorter.”
George shrugged. “Long as you know what you’re doing,” he said.
Darkness was just beginning to pull itself across the sky. The streetlamps were flickering to life, bathing the world in a mellow glow. The night was so still that George could hear the faint tick of insects hurling themselves against the phosphorescent bulbs. Jim was explaining the application process for the federal program, which, like all federal programs in George’s experience, seemed needlessly complicated.
They crossed an alley, passed a building marked Barnes Music Company, and came abreast of a corner restaurant. A big sign over the swinging, western-style saloon doors announced that this was the Silver Moon Café. The same sign promised “Steaks Chops Chicken Seafood.” George was thinking that this might be a good place to get lunch tomorrow when a glance through the window made the flesh jitter on his arm. Hard white faces glared back at him. It was a jarring sight. These people, he realized with a start, hated him deeply and personally without even knowing him. It was, he supposed, something of what it meant to be a Negro.
In the same instant that realization hit, the stillness was broken by the scuffle of feet. A group of white men was crossing the street, coming up from behind. Out of the corner of his eye, George saw that one of them was brandishing some sort of club. And there came a braying cry, “Hey, you niggers!” A fist of ice punched through George Simon’s gut.
“Just keep walking,” hissed Orloff.
“Don’t look at them,” said Jim. “Don’t run.” It reminded George of advice his father had given him once for handling a bad dog.
But these particular beasts would not be so easily dissuaded. The scuffling of feet drew closer. “Hey, you niggers!” the voice cried again. “You white niggers! We’re talkin’ to you!”
George was just turning when he saw the man swing the club, like a home-run hitter laying into a fat, slow pitch. Jim never saw it coming. It smashed into his left temple with an audible crunch and he went down, so stunned that he wasn’t even able to brace his fall. George reached out for him, but in that same instant, something hard and heavy slammed into his right side, driving the air from his body with explosive force. His knees unlocked and he went down.
Above him, around him, he heard voices crying out, heard the heavy thudding of men landing blows against the bodies of other men, elongated shadows moving under the lights. Someone ran. Someone else chased. “Here’s how it feels to be a nigger down here,” one of the white men growled, and there came another heavy blow.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, like a sudden squall on a spring day, it was over. George heard footsteps receding at a run, the white men returning to the shadows that had spawned them, chased by their own giddy laughter.
He staggered to his feet, disoriented, holding his side. “Is-is-is everyone okay?” he cried. In times of stress, George sometimes stammered.
There was no immediate answer to his cry. Then he heard someone yell, “Jim!”
George spun, his eyes finding the Boston minister, who was leaning against a building, one hand to his temple. There was a small cut above his left ear, but it was his eyes that frightened George. They were unfocused, fixed on nothing, as if there was no animating intelligence behind them. Jim was making sounds that he seemed to believe were words, but it was as if his mouth and his mind were disengaged from one another; the sounds had no meaning.
“Jim,” one of the other men said sharply, as if the sound of his name might re-tether him to a reality he seemed to have lost. “Come on, Jim, snap out of it.”
After a moment, Jim seemed to do just that. “My head,” he said. “Oh.”
The words, spoken in recognizable English, made George weak with relief. “We’ve got to get him to a doctor,” he said.
Orloff said, “The SCLC office is not far. They’ll know what to do.”
He and Clark hoisted Jim between them. They braced him as they staggered together down the darkened street. George, his right arm pinned against the pain in his ribs, followed them. He glanced back at the Silver Moon Café as they passed. The hard faces still stared after them. He’d have sworn he felt the darkness itself closing in.
When they lurched into the SCLC office, the same young Negro woman he’d met that morning at the church—Diane was her name—looked up from a typewriter. “What happened?” she asked.
“Gang of thugs attacked us,” said Clark. “We had just come out of that black diner.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Were you on the route I told you to take?”
“No,” admitted Clark. “We were hurrying to get back to the church.”
George braced himself for her to say how foolish they had been—strangers in an unknown and hostile town, veering from the directions they had been told would ensure their safety—but Diane simply nodded and picked up the phone. “He doesn’t look good,” she said with a nod toward Jim, who was once again muttering in a language that did not exist. “I’m calling an ambulance. He needs a doctor.”
Anxious minutes later, a long, black station wagon pulled to a stop in front of the building. The ambulance, George saw, was a hearse pulling double duty. Clark and Orloff got Jim into the back seat, where they sat flanking him. George sat up front next to the driver.
“My head,” Jim said again as the vehicle took off with a lurch. It was the first time he had spoken for long minutes. “My head is killing me.”
The car raced through the night-darkened streets of Selma. George thought it would be just their luck to get pulled over for speeding by some local cop. “Maybe we should go back to the chapel,” mused Orloff.
Clark nodded. “Maybe we can find some help there.”
The driver shook his head. “Even if you could get some help there, you couldn’t get close to the place. Dr. King is holding his meeting. Police have the street blocked off.”
George looked back at Jim. His skin was gray, his eyes were closed. He seemed unconscious. George closed his eyes and began a silent prayer. A tense voice interrupted him.
“We’ve got company,” said Clark.
As the driver checked his mirror, George looked out through the back of the station wagon. Oval-shaped headlights hovered in the darkness, about half a block back, keeping pace. “They’ve been with us the last mile,” said Clark. “Turn for turn.”
“Police, you think?” asked George.
Clark hunched his shoulders. “I have no idea. I suppose, under the circumstances, that would be the best-case scenario.”
“Maybe,” said Orloff, “but not by much.”
Minutes later, they braked to a stop before an old frame house in a Negro neighborhood. George questioned the driver with a look.
“This is it,” he said. “It’s called Burwell’s Infirmary.”
“What happened to our friends?” asked Clark, nodding toward the street behind them. The oval lights were gone.
“Don’t go asking the gift horse any questions,” said George.
“Amen,” said the driver.
Inside, a doctor examined Jim, shined a light into his eyes, checked his vital signs. “He needs X-rays,” he said, and a nurse wheeled him away on a stretcher, leaving George, Orloff, and Clark to pace nervously in the hallway. “You think he’s going to be okay?” asked Clark, speaking to no one in particular.
Orloff, holding against his head an ice pack he had been handed by a nurse, shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said. “He looked pretty bad.”
“I think he’s going to be okay,” said Clark. “I think he’s going to be fine.” George recognized the note of forced hope in his voice. A glance at Orloff showed that he did, too.
George tried again to pray. But just then a young intern approached, indicating with a nod the arm George still held wedged against the ache in his side.
“Doctor says I should look at that,” she said.
“Don’t worry about me,” said George. “Just take care of him.”
“How about if we do both?” she said.
She had phrased it as a question, but she took hold of George’s arm in a way that left him little room to refuse and led him into an exam room. “Take off your shirt,” she said.
George did as he was told. An angry purple bruise had bloomed on his torso. With brisk efficiency, the young woman prodded him for pain. When her fingers found the spot, he winced and grunted. “Ow,” he said.
She nodded. “I think it’s broken,” she said. “Broken ribs usually heal up on their own, but this will help.” George glanced up and saw that she was holding up a roll of elastic bandages.
Moments later, his ribs wrapped tightly and having swallowed a couple of aspirin for the pain, George was finally allowed to put his shirt back on and rejoin Clark and Orloff. Two police detectives were standing with them in the hallway, notepads open. One of them cocked his head in George’s direction. “This here is the third guy?”
Told that George was, in fact, the third victim, the detective introduced himself, flipped his notepad to a fresh page and said, “Okay, Reverend, why don’t you tell me what you saw?”
It soon became apparent to both of them that George had seen very little of use. “They came up from behind,” he said. “And I didn’t get a good look. It happened too fast.” He shook his head ruefully, feeling useless. Then, with a snap of his fingers, he remembered. “Wait a minute, there were witnesses, though. They were watching us from the window of some café …” He snapped his fingers again, trying to recall the name of the place.
“The Silver Moon?” one of the detectives asked.
“Yes,” said George pointing at him, “that’s the one.”
The detectives looked at each other, then the first one shook his head at George. “That’s a Klan hangout,” he said. “We’ll talk to them, but I can pretty much guarantee ain’t nobody in there seen a thing. Not that they’ll admit, at least.”
George was absorbing this when Clark and Orloff approached him. “I don’t suppose you have an extra $150 tucked in your shoe, do you?” asked Clark.
“What are you talking about?” asked George.
“Doctor says Jim needs a neurosurgeon,” Orloff explained. “But the nearest one is in Birmingham and the hospital there needs $150 before he can be admitted.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said George.
“I wish I was,” said Orloff with an exasperated shake of his head.
“Maybe SCLC can help,” said Clark. “Let’s go back over there.”
George looked from one to the other, disbelieving.
“Have you got a better idea?” asked Clark.
George did not.
The ministers and the doctor helped load Jim’s stretcher into the capacious rear of the black station wagon. The doctor drove the three ministers back to the SCLC office in his personal car as the ambulance followed.
As he watched the dark streets of Selma blur past his window, George found it hard to believe what was happening was actually happening—that instead of taking a stricken man for help, they were driving around this hateful little town trying to raise money. It felt surreal. Granted, $150 was no small amount, but wasn’t a man’s life worth more? And this was taking so long.
He thought of Jim lying on that stretcher in the car behind them and the thought repeated itself. It was taking far too long.
When they reached the SCLC office, Diane listened to their explanation, then wrote out a check to the hospital. The men all piled back into the station wagon—George and the doctor in the front seat next to the driver, Clark and Orloff in back with Jim—and set out for Birmingham, siren screaming. Very quickly, the city fell behind them. The driver silenced the siren and the hearse-turned-ambulance followed a cone of its own headlights down a two-lane Alabama road, the crunching of wheels against asphalt the only sound to be heard.
“How far to Birmingham?” asked George.
“Close to two hours,” said the driver. “Maybe less, being it’s late.”
George glanced at his watch. It was well after eight thirty. Too long. This was taking too long. But at least, he reassured himself, they were finally on their way.
Which is when there came a loud bang and the back of the vehicle jerked. “Look like we lost a tire,” said the driver, as he coasted to the shoulder of the road. “And we don’t have a spare.”
George’s eyes went to the ceiling of the car. He felt it again, this sense that he was living some absurdist nightmare, the three of them passing through a gauntlet of trials, each more jarring and bizarre than the one before. It was like something out of Job. Heck, it was like something out of Kafka.
“Uh oh,” said Clark.
“What now?” said the doctor.
George looked over his shoulder, his eyes following Clark’s gaze. What he saw made his body clench like a fist and flooded his mouth with the taste of metal.
A pair of oval headlights had pulled up behind them.
“Oh, God,” said the doctor.
“Oh, shit,” said the driver.
And George’s mind jeered at him in accusation.
She warned you, didn’t she? She tried to tell you.
Was it really just yesterday? It seemed so long ago, him standing there righteous and self-assured in the safety of their apartment in Harlem.
“You just sent Luther in there to look for Adam. Aren’t you worried about him?”
“Of course, I am. But at least he’s not going to some damn march. He’s not daring those white people to hit him. Luther is going to go in there, get Adam, and get right out. He understands the danger and he knows how to avoid it.”
“Whereas I don’t? Is that it?”
“You don’t. You couldn’t.”
“Because I’m just a dumb white guy.”
“You’re not dumb.”
But maybe he was. Maybe as a functional matter, “dumb” and “white” were pretty much the same thing in matters like this and nobody had ever bothered to tell him. Or maybe Thelma had tried to tell him, and he’d been too dumb and white to listen.
George stared at the white men in the car behind him. They sat there, just watching.
Thelma, he thought, would be home from the Legal Aid office by now. Maybe she was having the leftover spaghetti for dinner. Maybe watching Joey Bishop on television while she proofed some legal brief during commercials. Or maybe right now she was just sitting there watching the telephone, waiting for it to ring, waiting for her dumb, white husband to call and assure her that he had somehow managed to not get killed on his first day in the war zone into which he had come skipping with such blithe self-confidence.
Who would deliver the news to her if he died here? How would she take it? Would she mourn his memory or would some part of her be furious with him for the rest of her life?
Ah, honey, I’m sorry. I am so sorry.
Still, they waited. And still, the doors of the car behind them did not open. The white men did not move. They simply sat there, watching.
“What do you think they want?” asked Clark.
“What are they going to do?” asked Orloff.
Sitting next to George, the doctor lifted the transmitter for the vehicle’s radio telephone off the dashboard and punched a button on the device. “Hello,” he said. “Hello? Is anybody there? Is anybody receiving? Hello? Hello?”
“It’s busted,” said the driver. “They were going to get it fixed.”
“Lot of good that does us now,” said Orloff, as the doctor replaced the transmitter.
“Maybe we can run for it?” said Clark.
George shook his head, still looking back at the unmoving men in the mystery vehicle. “We run, we die,” he said.
“Yeah,” conceded Clark.
A moment.
“Hell with this,” said the driver. He put the car in gear, checked his side-view mirror, and gave it some gas. The vehicle limped back onto the road, wobbling unsteadily.
“What are you doing?” asked Clark.
The driver pointed. “Used to work at a radio station a mile or two up the road,” he said. “We get there, we can call for help. Have ’em send out another car.”
George looked behind them and saw the mystery car pull out and follow them. “We’ve still got company,” he said.
The driver glanced at his rear view. “I see,” he said.
Long, tedious minutes passed, filled only with the scrape of metal on metal mixed with the disconsolate flopping of ruined rubber. The car rocked gently with the motion of it. Jim’s head wobbled loosely. This was not good. George prayed another silent prayer. This was not good at all.
Finally, the driver said, “There it is,” and pulled into the parking lot surrounding a small red brick building bearing a radio station call sign. The unknown vehicle parked nearby.
The ambulance driver popped open his door. “Here goes nothin’,” he said.
Leaving the vehicle running, he stepped out of the car and walked at a measured pace—he didn’t run, but he didn’t linger—to the door of the radio station and rang the night bell. George kept an eye on the mystery car. Still no movement. After a long moment, the door to the building opened, and someone let the driver in. George released a breath. He looked into the back of the car.
“How’s Jim?” he asked.
“Same,” said Orloff.
“Alive,” said Clark. “About the best we can hope for.”
A moment passed. A moment sitting in a crippled vehicle with a stricken man in the rural darkness north of a country town filled with people who hated them without even knowing them, people who would be just as happy to see them all dead. George had not been this scared since the war. It was a sobering realization.
“Uh oh,” said Clark.
“What now?” said George, exasperated by the thought of yet another misfortune. He looked back and what he saw answered the question. The doors of the unknown vehicle had opened. The ragtag band of white men climbed out. One by one, the doors slammed.
George scanned their hands for weapons. Saw none. Thanked heaven for a small favor.
“M-m-make s-s-sure the doors are locked,” he said. “W-w-windows up.”
The men came on behind stupid grins that contained no humor. “Hey, what y’all doin’ in there?” cried one.
“Hey, who’s that in there?” cried another. “What y’all boys up to?”
Knuckles rapped against George’s window. “Y’all boys hear me talkin’ to you? I ast you a question.”
It was the knuckles on the window that did it.
In the months after he returned from the war, George had often felt like a man walking a tightrope. He spent his days pretending to be normal, pretending to be what everyone else around him was, just another Joe going to work and raising his family. But inside, he had often felt like some brittle thing strung together with high-tension wires, his nerves so taut that on bad days, he’d have sworn he could feel them humming.
Things set him off. On the bad days, it didn’t take much. A rude customer, a backfire, or, God help them both, some innocent person with a Japanese face. That was all that was needed and suddenly, George was hurled back to the heat and stench of Guadalcanal, to the brutality and degradation of a prison camp at Nagasaki, to the day the city was blown to pieces by the second atomic bomb.
It took years for him to get past that: lots of prayers, lots of Thelma, lots of time. But finally, there came a day when he realized it had been years since his guts felt like they were strung with wire, years since some innocent happenstance of modern life threw him back into the mud and muck and the constant, omnipresent fear. He had not forgotten the ordeal, not one second of it. But he had learned to control it. Learned to live with it.
Or at least, he thought he had.
With the rapping at his window, George felt his heart start jackhammering his broken ribs, felt his breathing come shallow and fast, felt his fists clench and unclench, felt the sweat bubbling on his skin, and he was scared, Lord, so scared, and the Japs, the miserable goddamn Japs, swarmed his position and he reached for the old Springfield bolt-action rifle they had been issued, which was better than no weapon at all, but not by much, and his head swiveled this way and that, and his wide eyes scanned the stinking wet jungle and he braced himself to kill or be killed, to shoot some sonofabitch cocksucker in his Jap face and …
“George!”
… and watch his brains fly out the back of his skull and …
“George!” The cry came again. George blinked. He found himself in a disabled ambulance in a radio station parking lot. The doctor was shaking his shoulder roughly.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
George felt his chest heaving. He nodded, dumbly.
“What happened to you?”
“Sorry,” said George, feeling humiliated. “Flashback from the war. I used to have ’em all the time. Haven’t had one in years.”
“Must have been a doozy,” said Orloff. “You were muttering about ‘Japs this’ and ‘Japs that.’”
George blinked again. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
He looked out through the window to escape their stares. The white men from the mystery car were still circling the station wagon. One of them knocked again on the window, which made George flinch. “Yoo hoo,” he cooed in a girlish falsetto, “y’all want to come out an’ play?”
Raucous laughter filled the air. And then, so did the screaming of a siren.
A replacement ambulance turned into the parking lot. It was followed closely by a sheriff’s patrol car. The ambulance driver stepped out of the radio station then. He had been waiting at the door. Moments later, a sheriff’s deputy flashed his light into the ambulance. Another knocked on a rear door and Orloff opened it.
“What happened to this man?” demanded the second deputy.
“He was beaten up back in town,” said Orloff. “He has a brain injury. We’re trying to get him to Birmingham.”
He glanced back at the white men from the mystery vehicle. George followed Orloff’s gaze and saw to his horror that where there had been a handful, now there were at least ten. “We sure could use a police escort,” said Clark.
The deputy shook his head. “We’ll radio ahead. That’s all you’ll need.”
George was not at all sure, but no one had asked them. The back of the vehicle swung open. The two drivers pulled Jim’s stretcher out, locking the wheels in place, then rolled it across the lot to the second ambulance. George, Clark, and Orloff piled out and followed.
“Who’s that?” demanded one of the white men, pointing to the stretcher.
“Where y’all takin’ him?”
“What’s happening here?”
Clark faced them. He lifted his palms and spoke a tired plea. “Please don’t,” he said. “Please, just don’t.”
His eyes held the flinty eyes of the white men behind them. There was a moment. Finally, George touched his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he whispered.
The three of them walked toward the new ambulance. Their driver met them there. “We got a problem,” he said.
“Of course we do,” said George.
“No brackets in back to hold the stretcher in place.”
Clark and Orloff shared a look. Then, without a word, they climbed into the rear of the vehicle with Jim’s stretcher. They braced themselves on either side of it, each gripping the railings to hold it steady. “Let’s go,” said Clark. “Let’s get a move on.”
With a shrug, the new driver slammed the back of the station wagon. George and the doctor climbed in and the vehicle roared off into the darkness of the night.
It was eleven o’clock when George saw the sign for Birmingham University Hospital. He felt no relief. Only numb exhaustion and fear. It had taken so long. There had been so many delays—so many needless, stupid delays. The ambulance pulled up outside the emergency room, but even as the back gate was pulled open, even as Jim’s stretcher was being wheeled into the emergency room, he was half convinced something else would happen.
Maybe the stretcher would buckle and Jim would fall on the floor.
Or the doctors would choose this moment to go on strike.
Or the power would go out.
He was braced for this new absurdity, whatever it might be, but it never came. Bare minutes after his arrival, Jim was whisked into surgery.
The three ministers stood there helplessly, looking at one another. Their mission finally accomplished, they had no idea what to do with themselves. George spoke for them all. “What now?” he asked.
“Y’all are the three ministers from Selma?” A short, chunky white woman in a nurse’s cap was coming toward them.
“Yes,” said Orloff. “I guess that’s us.”
She waved them to follow her. “There’s some people here want to talk to you.”
A mystified look passed between the three men. Then they followed her down a hallway, through a set of double doors. They opened it into a lightning storm of flashbulbs. Men started shouting questions at them. “I don’t want to do this,” said George.
“We have to,” said Orloff. “God forbid, if the worst happens to Jim, we owe it to him to let the world know what those people did to him.”
There was no arguing with that. George conceded with a nod and the three men spent the better part of the next hour answering reporters’ questions. They spent an hour after that being interviewed by agents of the FBI.
It was after one in the morning when, dazed and exhausted, they at last found themselves alone again. No one asking questions for the first time in two hours. No one forcing them to relive and remember. George asked a passing nurse about Jim and was told he was still in surgery. “Y’all are the three from Selma?” she asked.
George nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s us.” He must have looked as exhausted as he felt, because she offered to let them sleep in the room reserved for doctors on call. Clark and Orloff politely declined. They had called a local couple from their denomination, the Unitarian Universalists, who had agreed to put them up for the night. When the couple pulled up outside the emergency room a few minutes later, they offered George a bed as well, but he said he would wait at the hospital.
He shook hands with the other two men as they parted. Orloff said, “George, wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.”
“Same here,” said George.
Clark said, “He’ll be all right, don’t you think?”
“I hope so,” said George, trying to sound hopeful. But he couldn’t help himself. “Took such a long time getting him here, though.”
“Yeah, it did,” said Clark.
George gave a desultory wave as the two men passed through the doors.
When they were gone, he picked up the pay phone in the waiting room, empty at this hour but for a young woman cradling a weepy toddler with a fever. A television mounted on a wall beamed a test pattern into the room. George fished from his pocket a piece of scrap paper where Reverend Porter had scrawled the number of the apartment where he was being housed, then dropped a dime into the slot and dialed it.
“Sorry to call so late,” he told the woman who answered.
“Nonsense,” she said. “We been waitin’ to hear from you. Dr. King announced what happened. Y’all all right?”
“Jim’s still in surgery,” said George. “My ribs ache something terrible and Orloff got conked in the head.”
“Thank God you’re all still in the land of the livin’,” she said.
“Yes,” said George. “Amen.”
She put Porter on the line and George had to go through it all again. He tried to be patient. He knew it was only to be expected that people would be concerned, that they would want details. But Lord, he was tired. Finally, when Porter ran out of questions and was certain that George was all right, they agreed that he would drive up first thing in the morning and retrieve him.
Finally, George dropped another dime in the slot. He took a deep breath and dialed 0, ready at last to place the call he had been dreading. Moments later, he heard his wife assuring the operator that she would accept the charges and the operator said, “Go ahead, caller.”
“Hi, honey,” he said. “I’m sorry to call so late.”
“George,” she said, and to his dismay, there was no fog of sleep in her voice. “Are you all right? I’ve been so worried.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Well,” he amended, “I’ve got a bruised rib”—he couldn’t bring himself to say “probably broken”—“and I’m exhausted. But I’m all right.”
“I saw it on the news,” she said. “Some white minister from the North, was all they said. George, I was so scared.”
He heard the faint accusation in her voice. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I was with him,” said George. And he felt the sudden tears sliding down his cheek. “I was with him,” he said again, struggling to keep his voice steady. “There were four of us. And these white guys, they came out of nowhere.”
“George, I told you …”
“I know.”
“George, I tried to warn you …”
“Honey, please,” he said. And something in his voice caused her to fall silent.
George cleared his throat, mashed at the tears on his cheek. “I know what you told me,” he said. “And I promise you, we’ll have that conversation. But I can’t do it right now. Do you understand? I just can’t do it right now.”
After a silent moment she said, “I understand.” Her voice had softened. She took another moment and then she said, “Are you all right, George? I mean, are you really all right?”
He took a moment to think about that, to recall how a night that had begun with a song of reparative hope—“But I know, a change gon’ come,” sang Sam Cooke in the theater of his memory—had spun itself about and become a night of absurdist terror awful enough to catapult him back to the war. Now, here he sat in this room with this young woman and her sick toddler and this TV test pattern and this awful sense of exhaustion and weight. He felt as if he might just sit on this orange plastic chair in this nondescript space for the rest of his life.
“I don’t know,” he finally admitted.
“George …”
He cut her off before she could get started. “I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else. I’ll feel better in the morning. I promise.”
“All right, George,” she said, “if that’s what you want.” He could tell in her voice that she didn’t believe him for a second, but she was willing to let it go for now and he was so thankful for that. They talked another few minutes about nothing, words they forgot even as they spoke them. Finally, George said good night. He hung up the phone and sank into the chair. Then he leaned his head back until it met the wall, closed his eyes, and made ready to wait out the night.