March 28, 1968 dawned overcast and a little cool in Memphis.
Malcolm, who had slept poorly all night, finally gave up trying shortly after six. He rolled out of bed, washed, and dressed. The house was empty. His father, farmer’s son that he was, was already up and out, gone downtown for the rescheduled march.
Standing in the bathroom mirror preparing to follow him, Malcolm put on a black beret he had bought just for this occasion, cocking it ace-deuce til it sat at just the right rakish angle on his head. Then he slipped on a pair of dark glasses and took a look at his handiwork. The effect was startling. The man who faced him was unsmiling, mysterious, and not to be screwed around with.
Malcolm pulled a dark windbreaker over his shirt—he could not yet afford a leather jacket—and the effect was complete. He nodded in approval of the man facing him, dropped his pistol into his pants pocket, and was ready to go. Stepping outside, Malcolm saw Nanny Parker standing on her porch. The old woman was dressed in Sunday clothes, purse held in the crook of her arm, drinking her morning coffee beneath a broad black hat with pink flowers.
She saw him looking. “You walking down there?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s a long walk. My girlfriend Betty from church is coming to pick me up. You welcome to ride over with us, if you want.”
“No thank you, ma’am. I’d just as soon head over there now.”
She smiled. “You want to be with people your age. Don’t want to be tied up with a pair of old biddies like us. I understand.”
“I’m just eager to get there,” said Malcolm. Not quite a lie, not quite the truth.
“I know what you mean,” she said.
Malcolm regarded her, this woman who had given him shelter, standing there so proudly. And here was yet another chance—a last chance. He said, “Are you sure you should be going down there? What if things get out of hand? I would hate to see you get hurt.” It was as close as he could come.
She sucked her teeth in a sound of dismissal. “Who gon’ try to hurt me, old as I am? No, sir. There is no way I am going to miss this.”
“Okay, then,” said Malcolm, stepping down to the street. He had tried to tell her, hadn’t he? He’d as much as said it outright: don’t go. What else could he do?
Nothing, that’s what. Malcolm waved at the little woman and started walking toward downtown. He told himself his conscience was clear.
It was still dark when Bob and Janeka set out for Memphis. That morning, sitting alone together in his car in front of her dorm, they had turned to one another and Bob had taken both her hands in his. He breathed a soft, simple prayer: “Protect us, Lord. Get us there safely and bring us back in the same condition.”
“Amen,” she said.
“Amen,” whispered Bob. He squeezed her hands. Then he started the car and pulled off.
They drove in silence for the first couple of miles. Finally, Bob spoke, just to have something to say. “I’m looking forward to hearing Dr. King,” he said.
She didn’t answer. He glanced over. “How about you?” he asked. She seemed pensive and small in the darkness of not-yet-dawn.
“I suppose,” she finally said. “But to tell the truth, my main reason for going is to show support for the sanitation men. Have you read about their working conditions? The way that city exploits those men, it’s a sin, is what it is. It’s just a sin.”
“Yes,” said Bob. “But that’s why it’s a good thing Dr. King is coming to lead the march. He’s going to bring attention to the issue, how they’ve been exploiting the laboring classes. He’s going to force Memphis to deal with it. And not just Memphis, but by extension, the whole country.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said, gazing out her window to where the clouds had just begun to anticipate the sun. “I just don’t want it to be the same old song and dance.”
Bob glanced over at her, confused. “What does that mean?”
But Janeka just shrugged and did not answer, so Bob turned back to the road. He goosed the pedal and the car leapt toward Memphis.
A police helicopter was parked above Hamilton High School.
A brick flew toward it from the crowd below, hurled by some boy foolish enough to think his missile could reach the hovering machine. The brick arced high, then fell to earth, shattering harmlessly in a street filled with high school students who on this day would not be going to school.
A couple of the boy’s classmates jeered his miss. Then, a more realistic target presented itself, a laundry truck that came trundling unawares down the street. The boys let fly with more bricks. One of them struck home. The truck’s back door popped open and someone’s shirts, pants, and dresses spilled into the street. It made the boys double over with laughter when the uniformed driver stopped the truck, then jumped out to throw the clothes back in. He worked quickly and nervously and kept sweeping the crowd massed behind him with wide, frightened eyes. Then he slammed the door and hustled back into the cab. A brick landed right where he had been standing. The truck took off in a rush.
Malcolm, who had attended Hamilton until just a little more than a year ago, stood across the street watching all of this. The sun had burned the clouds away and the air temperature was rising. Hard to believe snow had lain thick on the ground just six days before. He had his windbreaker folded over his arm.
The crowd of young people milled in the street. Some were dancing. Some were laughing. A white woman came driving down that street now, honking for the kids to give way. But she didn’t understand, did she? Whitey wasn’t giving orders here today. Black people were done giving way.
So now, more bricks flew, bouncing off the hood and the trunk of her car. Malcolm could see the white woman’s face, congealed in terror. The realization that she would not be deferred to or obeyed seemed impossible for her to process. When the street opened up in front of her, she took off, tires squealing.
It was, thought Malcolm, watching her blow through the stop sign at the end of the block, a good thing to see white people frightened for a change. Lord knew black people had been frightened long enough.
And now, wouldn’t you know it? Here came a garbage truck, driven by some scab, some weak-kneed, lily-livered, Uncle Tom nigger, driving behind a police car with lights silently flashing. Rocks, bottles and bricks flew in from all directions, making a sound like a hailstorm as they slammed against all that Detroit steel. Malcolm caught a glimpse of the scab as he drove past, his jaw set like concrete, both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes locked dead ahead.
The sight of him was a provocation Malcolm couldn’t resist and didn’t really want to. He cupped his hands. “You better run, you backstabbing motherfucker!” he yelled.
A boy next to him grinned. “You got that right, baby,” he said.
The crowd of students was seeping like water and had begun to overflow Malcolm’s position. Across the street at the school, teachers—many of them black—were in the parking lot trying to herd the kids back to class. But the kids just laughed and said they weren’t going anywhere. This was a new day. None of the old badges of authority meant jack shit anymore.
“I am a man,” yelled one boy to no one in particular.
“Black power!” yelled another, to the same audience.
“Fuck all you white bastards!” yelled a girl. This, as police cars swept onto the scene. More rocks and bottles hammered against more Detroit steel. There was the satisfying crunch of a windshield spider-webbing with cracks as a brick bounced off. Police came out of the cars. They wore gas masks. They raised billy clubs.
Students scattered. Some ran along side streets; some ran back toward the main school building; some ran toward police, missiles in their hands, lips curled around taunts and screams.
Malcolm ran.
Bob took Janeka’s hand as they walked up Hernando toward the church where the marchers were gathering. She looked at him and he knew she was wondering if this was wise. He didn’t know if it was. He only knew that he didn’t really care. He only knew that he was tired of hiding. Let them look.
And they did. The crowd was a mixture of hard-faced older men and church ladies, of high school students larking about, of preachers in clerical collars and small children playing under the tolerant gazes of their mothers, and of unsmiling young men in berets. Nobody approached him and Janeka, but he felt them marking their passage.
After a moment, Janeka pulled her hand from his. She scratched her cheek, folded her arms.
They stood together in the shadow of the church. Clayborn Temple vaguely resembled a fairytale castle. It even had a tower on one end.
He was surprised there were so few white faces on hand for a march that was to be led by Martin Luther King. The few who were there stood, like him, scanning the crowd. Each white face wore the same expression—that of a person who has fallen asleep and awakened, somewhat bewildered, in a strange new place he’s not entirely certain is safe. A white man nodded at him and Bob realized that in scanning the crowd, they were looking for one another, searching out another pair of blue eyes or ruddy cheeks so that they might feel a little less marooned.
It was an odd and discomfiting feeling.
“Not a lot of white folks here,” said Janeka, and Bob started. It was as if she had read his mind.
“No,” he said, “there aren’t.”
Her grin was quicksilver. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll protect you.” And she reached and took his hand once more.
“I’m not worried,” he told her. But he was.
Not far away a group of black women stood comforting a white woman who was bawling that someone had stolen her wallet. Her pocketbook gaped open like a mouth. Bob was stunned and unsettled. How could these people do something so low and mean to someone who was trying to help them?
He caught himself. These people. Where had that come from? It wasn’t “these people” who had done this. It was some pickpocket in a crowd.
The fact that he had to remind himself of this embarrassed him. Bob lowered his head, intending to offer a quick prayer of repentance. Before he could get a word out, Janeka was leading him over to the crying woman. He watched, first confused and then amazed, as his girlfriend, her own eyes brimming, touched the white woman’s shoulder. The woman looked up.
“I’m sorry,” said Janeka. “I’m so sorry.”
Like she had done it herself. Like she had reached into this woman’s purse and plucked out her wallet.
“It’s not the money,” said the woman, still weeping. “I only had $10. The stuff that was in there, it can all be replaced. But I just never thought, at a march like this…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. It finished itself in the helpless glaze of her eyes. Janeka looked up at the other black women. All their eyes reflected the same helplessness.
“Did you hear? Did you hear?” A man’s voice, agitated.
Bob turned and saw him. Some scruffy black guy in a denim jacket, his eyes hot. “Did you hear?” he called again and now people were looking toward him, waiting. “They done killed some girl,” he cried. “Police done killed some girl at Hamilton High School. Bashed her head in, the no-good honky motherfuckers.”
He was looking directly at Bob when he said it.
No girl had been killed at Hamilton High.
At least, Malcolm didn’t think so. The rumor of her death was being passed through the crowd like a virus, but he had just hiked over from Hamilton and hadn’t seen anyone being killed. Certainly, there had been confusion, students running everywhere, ducking between buildings, darting through back yards, police hot on their heels. And a girl had fallen, yes. She’d even been hit by the cop who was chasing her. But she had seemed all right, after. Bloodied, a little scraped, but all right. She hadn’t died.
Had she?
And he realized: he couldn’t really say for sure one way or another. It made his stomach clench.
“Hey, baby, you all right?” Eddie had come up on him and was regarding him with what may have been—it was difficult to tell through the shades—concern.
Malcolm blurted, “You don’t really think they killed some girl, do you?”
Eddie’s smile was tight as a rusted bolt. He said, “Ain’t much I would put past white police. How about you?”
“I guess not,” said Malcolm. “Damn shame, though. I was just over there.”
Eddie clapped him on the back. “Get yourself together. They gon’ start their march soon. Time to wake these country Negroes up.”
Malcolm’s nod was vague and as Eddie drifted away, he surveyed the crowd. Some white nuns and priests had appeared. A group of black teachers stood together, watching as one of their number knelt down and used her lipstick to make a sign. Young men wandered through the crowd wearing jackets that said “Invaders.” They were supposed to be some kind of activist group.
Malcolm spotted his father at the same time his father spotted him. The older man was perched with Sonny on a low wall across the street from the church, both holding their placards with the emphatic red lettering on a field of white: I AM A MAN. Malcolm wandered over.
“Hey, Pop,” he said, removing his shades. “Sonny.”
Pop said, “Mornin’, Junie.”
Sonny said, “Hey.”
“What time is this supposed to begin?” asked Malcolm.
“About ten,” said Pop. “But now they sayin’ King been held up. So don’t nobody know when it gon’ start.”
“You got a good-size crowd,” said Malcolm, squinting a little as he took in the growing throng.
Pop nodded. “More of them than us,” he said.
Malcolm said, “What do you mean?”
Pop shrugged. “At the beginning, this was just about us sanitation mens. Now it’s about…” He paused, surveyed the crowd, hunched his shoulders again. “Hell, I don’t know what it’s about now.”
“People just want to support you, Pop. They’re standing behind you, trying to make sure you get what you deserve.”
At that moment, a teenaged boy walked past, saying to no one in particular, “We’re going to get us some white folks today.”
Pop stared at Malcolm, his eyes questioning. Malcolm held his eyes for only a moment. Then he looked away.
There was a wrongness here.
Bob could not name it, but he felt it, deep in his bones. This was his first protest march and he didn’t know what he had expected, but he knew he hadn’t expected this: to find himself wondering if he was safe among the people he was marching to support.
“We’re going to get us some white folks today,” some passing teenaged boy said.
Bob stared after him in disbelief. Janeka reached for his hand.
“Don’t pay that fool any mind,” she said. “He’s just some boy running off at the mouth.”
Bob nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. For years, he had dreamt of joining a protest march led by the great Martin Luther King. He had dreamt of this like some kids dreamt of being Mercury 7 astronauts or having a catch with Mickey Mantle. He had watched, breathless, the nightly news coverage of King’s great protests in Birmingham, St. Augustine, Selma, and he had wondered—barely an adolescent, not even shaving yet, but he had wondered—if he had what it took, if, when the moment came, he would be strong enough in his faith to stand there and take it while some mob of vicious racists kicked him and punched him and called him every dirty name in the book, yet not raise a hand back to them and, indeed, pray for them even as they harmed him.
His perplexed parents called him “tenderhearted” when he complained about the injustices the Negroes had to endure. Oh, they agreed that, as his father once put it, the Negroes got a “bad deal down there,” but they didn’t see why he felt that he, personally, had to do something about it. They didn’t see why he couldn’t just send some of the money he earned working part-time to the NAACP or some such group and be done with it. They didn’t see why he insisted that he needed to do more, much less what that sense of obligation had to do with being a Christian.
But then, he had long since realized, to his mild disappointment, that his parents defined that word differently than he did. They were willing enough to spend Sunday mornings in church, to put a little extra into the poor box at Christmas, and to donate one of Estelle Carson’s famous lemon pound cakes for the annual church picnic. But the idea of faith as an activist thing, the idea that it could require one to give one’s own body in sacrifice for a good cause, struck them as, well…extreme.
So they had watched their oldest son with a kind of awed fascination and inchoate fear as he bubbled over in his enthusiastic admiration for John Lewis, a Negro college student whose skull was fractured on a bridge in Selma, or Jim Zwerg, a white college student who had his back broken at a bus station in Montgomery. Not that he wanted to be hurt like them, he had explained quickly, but he wanted God to test him as He had tested them. He wanted to know that he could pass that test, that he had the courage to put his faith into action.
Concerned, Bob’s parents had asked their pastor, Oliver Purvis, a mild, bespectacled Presbyterian who owned a used car lot in town (“A Fair Deal—You Have My Word On It”) to talk to their son. Reverend Purvis had dutifully tried to convince Bob that it was enough simply to want better for the Negroes and all of God’s mistreated children, to send money and prayers to help them and that it wasn’t necessary to bleed for them.
Bob had listened politely and when the preacher was finished he said, “Yes, sir, but Dr. King says that if a man hasn’t found something he’s willing to die for, he’s not fit to live. Don’t you believe that?”
Purvis had swallowed hard and said, “Well, yes, I do, but this isn’t your fight, now is it?”
And Bob had said, “Yes, but what about where the Bible says, ‘Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us?’”
Fifteen years old and staring earnestly at the man who had once sprinkled water onto his face and pronounced him baptized. Reverend Purvis had given him a strange look. Then he said, “Well, you know, Bobby, you’ve given me a lot to think about.” And he excused himself, and did not return.
So Bob had continued to dream of this moment, of one day having the opportunity to march behind Martin Luther King.
But he had not dreamt it would be like this.
There was an anger here he had not expected. It wasn’t just the loud brashness of some kid. No, you could sense it, you could smell it, you could see it.
He looked around at the young men in the berets, their eyes behind dark glasses.
He looked at the high school kids making their own makeshift signs: FUCK MAYOR LOEB said one. LOEB EAT SHIT said another.
He looked at the preachers looking at their watches and assuring everyone within earshot that Dr. King would be here soon.
He looked at the students, laughing and joking and yelling out the names of their schools like some kind of challenge—or threat.
He looked at the marshals with their yellow armbands, trying to get the students to pipe down, line up, behave.
He looked at the white people, still scanning for other white people.
He looked at the men, the sanitation workers who stood together in their ill-fitting coats and shiny pants, with their faces carved and eyes squinted by endless years of riding on trucks and toting garbage through sun and cold, the men who seemed somehow shrunken, lost, and even forgotten in this crush of disparate people gathered in their name.
A boy paraded through the crowd holding high a tree branch. From it dangled two objects. One was a noose. The other was a sign that read, LOEB’S HANGING TREE. “Oh yeah,” the boy said through a broad grin, “this here is gon’ be a nonviolent, peaceful march. Yes, sir!” He rolled his eyes. All around him, young people shrieked with hysterical laughter.
Bob stood there watching this confusion on Hernando Street in front of the Clayborn Temple and heard himself whisper his doubts to the bright morning air. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
The crowd was growing. A police helicopter chopped its way through the air above. And it was getting hot. The sun, having burned its way through the morning clouds, was making up for lost time.
Off came jackets and coats. Newspapers and leaflets fluttered beneath shining faces, having been pressed into service as impromptu fans.
“Fuck nonviolence,” a rangy, dark-skinned man was saying. “One of them crackers bust me upside my head, I’m gon’ put that bastard on the ground. You best believe that.”
Malcolm felt his father tense and he knew Pop was about to confront the man. He was thankful when some preacher got there first. “Brother,” he said, “I appreciate your feelings, but this is a nonviolent march, and if you can’t accept that discipline, then we just ask respectfully that you do not participate.”
The man’s mouth worked for a moment as he regarded the man in the clerical collar. “I’m just sayin’,” he finally said. “That’s all.”
“I understand,” said the preacher. His voice was all reason and calm. “But we still ask that you do not disrupt what we are trying to do. Can I count on you for that?”
The man glared. “Ain’t disruptin’ nothin’. Just sayin’.”
When the preacher didn’t respond, the man flung his hands in a gesture of dismissal and walked away. The preacher shook his head, then glanced at his watch as he wandered off through the crowd. “Everybody be cool,” he was saying. “We’ll be starting in a minute.”
“Glad he got rid of that fool,” said Pop. He nudged Sonny. “Ain’t never lifted a tub a day in his life. What the hell he doin’ here? What make him think he got the right to run his mouth?”
“You could say that about a lot of them,” said Sonny.
“You think you could do it, Pop?” asked Malcolm.
“Do what?”
“Stand there and take it while some whitey beats on you?”
Pop pursed his lips. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “But I’m willing to try.”
“Lord have mercy,” said Sonny. “Look at this fool.” He was pointing toward a man who stood unsteadily in the street near a group of high school students, hoisting a bottle of cheap wine. The students’ laughter was harsh and loud.
“Don’t bogart the whole thing, Pops!” one boy yelled.
“Yeah, save some of that for me!” another cried.
“You gon’ drink after him?” some girl asked, scandalized.
“Hell, wine’s wine,” said the boy and the ugly laughter renewed itself.
There were, now that Malcolm looked, a number of disheveled men drifting through the crowd. There were pimps in flashy suits, hair straight as a ruler and gleaming with congolene. There were hustlers in straw stingy brims and pencil moustaches, eyes always on the make, sizing up the crowd. The shifty dregs of Beale Street, on the way home from their nighttime revels, had detoured by to enjoy the spectacle.
There were so many people out here. Thousands. Easily, thousands. Where had they all come from?
“You right,” said Sonny. “Ain’t even our march no more.”
“You know, Miss Parker said she was coming,” said Malcolm. “I don’t like the idea of her being out in the middle of all this.” He had to raise his voice as the orbit of the police helicopter brought it right overhead.
Pop had little use for Nanny Parker. Her very existence was a reminder of the bad times, all the days Malcolm had sought refuge over there. But even he shook his head now and said, “No, that old lady got no business being out here. Too many people, too much confusion.”
A man was passing out placards with sticks attached so the signs could be hoisted into the air. MACE WON’T STOP TRUTH, they read. One girl read this without apparent interest. Then she flipped the sign over and pried the stick off. As the placard fell into the street, she lifted the stick for her friends to see. “Look!” she cried.
Moments later, placards littered the street and sticks, like pine wood swords, began to wave high above the crowd.
It was about eleven when the white Lincoln Continental finally came gliding down the street. The young people in the crowd pressed themselves against it, slapping at it, pounding on it, or just touching it, laying hands on it as though they might draw some magic, some knowledge, some valuable essence, just from contact with the metal.
The car nosed its way through the people and finally stopped, unable to move any further. The crowd had simply congealed around it.
Bob climbed atop a low stone wall next to some sanitation men. He reached down and gave Janeka his hand so that she could come up as well. It gave them a perfect vantage point.
What they saw was chaos.
The people—and most of them were children, laughing, giggling, giddy—were mashed so heavily against the car that the doors could not be opened. “Hey, Dr. King,” they sang out. “Hey, Martin!”
“Move back!” cried one of the marshals.
“Give them some space!” cried another.
They were trying to shove the young people off the car, but there was nowhere for them to go, so tightly was the crowd massed.
“People in the back, move back!” cried a man in a clerical collar. “Give them some room!”
“This is a mess,” said Bob.
“You got that right,” said the sanitation man standing on his left.
It took a long time. The men inside the car were trapped there until a group of ministers linked arm in arm bulled their way through the crowd. A window came down and one of the ministers, a stocky man with a large, square head, leaned in for what looked like urgent consultation with the men inside.
Still the crowd jostled and pushed. Bob was grateful he’d had the foresight to seek sanctuary on this wall off to the side. “I didn’t think it was going to be like this,” he told Janeka. It felt almost like an apology.
After a moment, the preachers managed to push the crowd back far enough for the door to swing open. A dark-skinned man with blunt features stepped out first, and Bob recognized him as Ralph Abernathy, King’s best friend and second-in-command. He buttoned his coat as he looked over the crowd. He did not seem pleased.
Then another man stepped out of the car and this, finally, was Martin Luther King. The crowd went wild. They surged forward, straining to touch him, reaching to lay hands on the top of his head, his shoulder, his hand, the hem of his garment.
Like they reached toward Jesus, thought Bob. The thought was unnerving.
“My Lord,” said Janeka, reading his thoughts yet again, “you’d think it was the Second Coming.”
The ministers staggered under the onslaught, but the line held and they surrounded King and cleared a path to the front of the march. Martin Luther King was not a big man. Rather, he was on the short side, with a stocky build going over to outright fat. But in the midst of that crowd he seemed smaller still, flotsam bobbing on a tide of human passion. Pushed and shoved and yanked about, people screaming and shouting, a police helicopter beating the air above him, he looked anxious, even scared.
Bob looked closer, then, and realized there was something else in those eyes. Exhaustion. A grinding fatigue. Martin Luther King was so tired he could barely stand.
The phalanx of ministers almost carried him through the crowd.
“Give way!” they shouted.
“Clear the way!”
A flatbed truck stood at the intersection, mounted with news cameras. One of the ministers shouted, “Get the sanitation men up front with Dr. King!”
“Guess that’s us,” said the man next to Bob to a friend on the other side.
The two men stepped down from the wall and began making their way toward the front. A boy came up from behind, elbows high, pushing his way through the crowd. He caught the taller man in the chest and almost knocked him down. The boy didn’t stop, didn’t even pause.
“You all right?” asked the taller man’s friend.
The taller man just shook his head and spoke in a bitter voice. “Like I told you: more of them than us.”
Malcolm watched as the mob—it was difficult to think of this unruly mass as a march—stretched itself down Hernando and then, far up in the distance, swung left on Beale. His father, he knew, was somewhere up in the front with the other sanitation men, jostled and pushed by high school boys trying to get close to Dr. King. Now Malcolm, who had hung back, brought up the rear, walking in an assemblage of young men with sunglasses, T-shirts, and Invaders jackets.
He was thinking about his father, whom he’d watched shoved aside by some boy running to see King.
The truth was, he felt sorry for Pop, for all the sanitation men whose great march was being taken from them by unruly children. Even now, a trio of teenaged boys was running up and back on the sidewalk along the sides of the mob—the march—laughing and giggling like they were at the state fair. At 19, Malcolm was only three or four years older, but it felt like a gulf of decades.
It wasn’t fair to the sanitation men, what was happening. Much less what was going to happen.
But, he reminded himself, it needed to happen. All of it needed to happen. These men needed to learn that Martin Luther King was not some savior with magic powers and a fancy suit. This city and this country needed to learn that henceforth, they would have to deal with a new movement that was impatient by design, that would not be mollified by marches and pretty speeches, that would demand—and take—what black people were rightfully owed.
From far ahead, the sound of singing drifted back on the warm morning air. “We shall overcome,” the voices caroled, the melody stately and yet from this distance, somehow insubstantial and frail.
“We shall overcome,” they sang. “We shall overcome, someday.”
Pulling at the last syllable, running it up and down the scale, through colorations of want, need, and hope.
Someday. A pathetic word, freighted with too damn much patience. Why couldn’t they see that? What was it about getting old that leeched the fire from your bones and made you content with singing hymns to maybe, possibly, and tomorrow? Malcolm didn’t understand and hoped he never would. All at once, he was reminded of a rock song this white boy at his college used to play in the dorms over and over again.
“Hope I die before I get old,” the singer sneered. Amen to that, amen to that.
“Down with Loeb! Down with Loeb! Down with Loeb!”
This chant rose full and lusty from somewhere in the middle of the mob ahead, contrapuntal with the sweet, patient lyric being sung in the front. It made him grin. “Now that’s more like it!” he cried to no one in particular.
“You got that right, baby,” said the man next to him.
If it wasn’t fair the sanitation men’s march was being overtaken, overrun by kids, well, life itself wasn’t fair. And maybe the kids knew something the old folks didn’t know or, being old, had allowed themselves to forget: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Too much patience only gave whitey permission to ignore you. No, what you had to do was make yourself impossible to ignore.
“Black power!” he shouted. It came from out of nowhere and it felt good. He liked the urgency and the immediacy of it, the implicit reminder that “someday” was not nearly soon enough. So he shouted it again. “Black power!”
A group of them picked up the chant, bringing up the tail end of the march. “Black power! Black power! Black power!”
Beale Street was just ahead.
The crowd was moving too fast.
Bob had always imagined that a protest march maintained a dignified pace, the better to emphasize the long suffering that motivated it and the righteousness from which its power sprang. But this march was moving at a quickstep, pushed along from behind by young people, still cutting through the crowd, still running along the outskirts, trying to get close to Martin Luther King.
King seemed to be getting the worst of it, at least as far as Bob could tell from his vantage point several rows back. His head lolled on his neck from time to time and the men to either side of him seemed less to be marching with him than simply holding him upright.
Bob stumbled as some student shoved past on his left, yelling over his shoulder. “There he is! There King right there!”
“Watch it!” yelled Bob, his voice sharp.
The boy didn’t even notice. It made Bob fume. This was not how it was supposed to be.
He remembered Janeka, then, and worried, because she was a small woman and could easily be hurt if this march, this mob, got much more out of hand. “Are you all right?” he asked her.
“I’m fine,” she said in a voice that quivered slightly and did not convince him at all. Her hand clung to his as another impatient teenager tried to push between them.
“You don’t look fine,” he told her as the teenager finally gave up and went another way. Her eyes were round and mostly white.
“I’m fine,” she repeated, trying for definitive emphasis, but not quite getting there.
“Maybe we should go,” said Bob. “These people are getting out of hand.”
She arched an eyebrow. “These people?”
It irked Bob. “You know what I mean,” he told her. “Don’t start that. I’m just saying this crowd could be dangerous. Maybe we should get out of here while we can.”
“And how would we do that?” she asked.
This, Bob was forced to admit, was a good question, hemmed in as they were on all sides by walls of humanity. Getting out would require hacking his way through with one hand, Janeka trailing behind holding onto the other. It was possible, but it would not be easy. Not at all.
Bob was still trying to figure out what to do when he heard the sound. Everybody looked to everybody else. “What was that?” asked Bob.
But he already knew.
The pine sticks that had been designed to hold the placards high in the air were thin and so, made poor cudgels. The boys had to hammer the clothing store window several times before it finally broke, caving in on itself in a cascade of glass that chimed and tinkled like some devil’s xylophone.
A cheer went up. Fists went up. “Black power!” someone cried. “Black power!”
The store had been breached; the remains of the window hung in jagged shards, but no one even bothered to go inside. Malcolm watched, frozen in amazement, as a couple of boys grabbed items from the broken display case—a man’s hat and a pair of shoes—and then ran, holding the items above their heads like trophies. Looting the store, he realized, this wasn’t the point. No, the point was the breach itself, the line crossed, the barrier broken, and whitey forced to see that this was a new day and nobody was taking his shit anymore.
“Black power!” they cried.
And the cry echoed and doubled back upon itself. “Black power! Black power! Black power!”
“Damn it! They’re breaking windows back there!”
This is what one of the sanitation men cried as the march leaders paused, looking back toward the sound.
“They’re ruining the march!” cried a minister right next to Bob.
Another minister—Bob recognized him as the same stocky man who had conferred with King when the white car pulled up—took a bullhorn and started walking toward the back of the march. “You are hurting the cause,” he called out. “This is a nonviolent campaign.”
There was the sound of another window breaking.
Bob still had Janeka’s hand. It was small and sweaty in his.
“What about you, brother? You just going to watch?”
This was Eddie, coming up behind Malcolm, sweat beading on his brow. And Malcolm realized he had indeed just been standing there transfixed, as the second window caved in and another cheer went up. Somehow, he felt sickened and exhilarated all in the same instant. He did not know how that was possible, but it was.
“Well?” demanded Eddie. “What you gon’ do?”
Malcolm looked at him. He felt himself teetering, as if on the deck of a ship rolling across the waves. He felt himself balancing as if on a tightrope between the life he had lived all these years until this very moment and everything that would come after.
On the ground was an abandoned stick from one of the placards. With a nod to Eddie, he reached down and snatched it up. He held it high as he charged forward like some soldier in a forgotten war. Screaming some cry beyond words, he brought the stick down hard upon the head of the rapist Rupert Pruitt, upon the head of a white cop with a can of Mace, upon the head of a long-haired white college professor who had once patronized him with a smile and asked him to describe to a class of earnest white faces what it was like “for our black brothers in the ghettoes”—and upon the window of a pawnbroker notorious among black people in Memphis for miserly loans and usurious rates.
He broke the glass with one fury-driven blow. The sound of it shattering was symphonic.
Malcolm heard himself laughing, joyous in madness.
With the exception of the helicopter hovering overhead, there had been no real police presence. The apparent absence, Bob assumed, had been a tactical decision to avoid unnecessary provocation.
That all changed now with a suddenness.
Behind him, he saw police pouring out from side streets, batons high, Mace cans in hand.
“Oh, my God,” said Janeka.
Martin Luther King’s men saw it too. One of them said, “We’ve got to get you out of here, Doc.”
King shook his head. “No,” he said, “we must get this under control. If I leave now, they’ll say I ran away.”
The other man was exasperated. “Martin, it is not safe for you to be here.”
Something pained showed on King’s face. “Perhaps we can talk to them. Get them to settle down.”
The other man swept his hand toward the other end of the street, where police could be seen chasing teenaged boys in and out of buildings, nightsticks flashing. “Does that look like something we can settle down?”
Another man spoke to Abernathy. “I understand Martin’s concerns,” he said, “but you need to get him out of here.”
King surrendered with a palpable reluctance. Bob watched as two of his men linked arms with him and led him down a side street. There, one of the men flagged down a white Pontiac. Moments later, it roared away with King and Abernathy inside.
Watching this, Bob felt…abandoned.
This was his hero? This was the great Martin King, this stocky little man being hustled away to safety as all hell broke loose around him?
For a long moment, Bob just stood there, chaos swirling around him. The police helicopter hovering above. Someone yelling, “Go back to the church!” The sanitation men dutifully obeying, turning around and walking in a group back toward the temple. A police officer yelling, “Get back here, you black son of a bitch!” as some fleet-footed young man outdistanced him. Glass breaking. People running every which way.
He was still holding Janeka’s hand. Now he looked down into her face and saw his own fear reflected. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he told her.
He didn’t wait for her response. They took off, running.
Now the looting began in earnest, people clambering through broken windows, taking whatever there was to take.
Malcolm stood breathing heavily by the broken window, still frozen by the wonder of what he had done, until Eddie clapped him hard on the back, breaking the spell. “Come on, fool. Stop daydreaming and get your ass on in there. You the one broke it. You get first pick!”
Malcolm didn’t want first pick. He didn’t want anything. The triumph that had sizzled through him an instant ago, the righteous vindication of watching that window cave in on itself, had dissipated like fog under the sun. All he felt now was an abrupt wrongness, a deep unease that bubbled like nausea in his gut.
But how to say this? What words might encapsulate it, especially in this moment where there was no time for words because everything was moving so damn fast?
Malcolm didn’t even try to say it. He didn’t resist. How to resist? Everywhere you looked, everybody you saw was climbing in a window, coming out with sport coats and whiskey and toy trucks and trumpets and women’s hats. The windows were down, the barriers were crossed, the rules no longer applied.
“Yeah,” said Malcolm, “all right.” And he joined the crowd pouring through the window into Johnson Brothers Pawnbrokers.
Bob and Janeka ran hand in hand back down Beale Street.
It was dangerous going this way, but they had no choice. They did not know the city and Bob was scared of getting lost in this madness if he tried to improvise a new route back to his car. So the only thing he could think to do was run straight back the way they had come, through the heart of the madness.
And it was, indeed, madness. Boys with rocks squaring off with police. A violin sitting broken and useless right in the middle of the street. Some boy, for no apparent reason, heaving an empty whiskey bottle so that it struck an older black woman in the back of the head, driving her to her knees. Now, teargas canisters were hitting the asphalt with metallic clinks, hissing their noxious fumes into the air.
It burned. Bob buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his forearm. Then he thought about Janeka. “Are you all right?” He tried to yell this, but his voice was muffled and she didn’t answer. He lifted his head and turned to look behind him, still running. “I said, are you—”
Bob never even saw the fist that came from out of nowhere then and landed flush on his jaw. He had been running at top speed and now, like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon, his legs ran right out from under him. He landed hard, banging his head on the sidewalk, skidding on concrete littered with broken glass.
Before he knew what had happened to him, a man came down hard on his chest and started pounding him with a manic glee.
“White motherfucker!” he cried. “Hate all you bastards!”
Malcolm had picked up a little transistor radio, just to be picking something up, just to make Eddie stop haranguing him about taking first pick of the merchandise. Now, they were the last two stepping through the broken pawnshop window. Eddie’s arms were loaded down with a bizarre assortment of loot: suits and a typewriter and a guitar and a vacuum cleaner.
He was grinning derision at Malcolm. “All that shit in there, I don’t know how you end up with a little cheap-ass radio,” he said.
Malcolm never got a chance to reply.
“Freeze!” the cop cried. Just like on television. And just like on television, he had the drop on them, stood with gun drawn and ready to fire.
Malcolm’s hands went up. Eddie dropped his stuff and was raising his own hands.
Their salvation came in the form of a brick. It arced in from across the street and struck the cop hard on the back of the head. He was wearing a riot helmet, so it didn’t hurt him, but he staggered from the blow and turned automatically to see what it was. Too late he realized his mistake.
Before he could turn back, Eddie had taken him to the ground and they were wrestling for the gun. The cop was fending Eddie off with his forearm, trying to yank his gun hand free from Eddie’s grip. “Officer down!” he cried. “Officer down!” Then Eddie punched him, two hard kidney shots that brought the cop’s forearm down to protect his side. Now Eddie went for the hand that held the gun, sinking his teeth deep into the white man’s thumb. He cried out, his hand came open, and the gun clattered free. Eddie snatched it up and sprang to his feet. His sunglasses had come off in the struggle and his eyes were twin dots as he pointed the weapon at the police officer lying at his feet. Eddie’s triumphant grin showed bloodstained teeth.
The cop’s hands came up. “I’ve got kids,” he said in a slow, careful voice. “Ezra and Sally.”
Eddie just grinned. And without even knowing he was going to do it, Malcolm put himself between the cop and the gun.
“Get out the way, brother,” Eddie told him. In contrast to his mad eyes, his voice was deliberate and calm.
“Don’t do this, man!” cried Malcolm.
Eddie sneered. “Come on, baby. What you care about some whitey? Some cop at that?”
And how to explain?
It was one thing to be mad at whitey. Who wasn’t mad at whitey? But it was another thing to watch a man about to be killed right in front of you, to see his hands come up as he spoke his children’s names, to look in his frightened eyes and see reflected there the terrible realization that everything he was and everything he would ever be had reached an end. This was an awful thing to see, no matter what color the man you saw it in.
But he did not know how to say this, so he said instead, “This ain’t black power, brother. This is just murder.”
Eddie didn’t answer. A forever crept by in silence, Eddie staring down the length of the revolver to the man lying so still on the sidewalk.
All at once, the mad eyes softened. Eddie raised the gun to menace only the sun. Then he tucked it in the small of his back.
“Fine,” he said. “You like this pig so much, you can have him, ‘brother.’”
He put something nasty on the last word, something that made the word contradict itself, even hate itself. He smiled. And then he left. He did not run away. He strolled. Malcolm watched.
“You saved my life.”
It was the police officer, his voice shaky. Malcolm had forgotten all about him. The cop had come to his feet and his outstretched hand was the first thing Malcolm saw when he turned. Malcolm took it automatically, because what else do you do when a man offers you his hand? Then the officer lifted the riot shield on his helmet and for the first time, Malcolm saw his face. He froze.
Who…?
He knew this face, but he could not place it.
And then he could.
He had seen this man on Main Street two blocks south of City Hall a little over a month ago. The man had sprayed him in the face…
(like a damn roach)
…called him a nigger and told him to go jump in the river.
He pulled his hand back. He could see the cop wondering why. Malcolm tried to speak. He laughed instead. It was a bitter sound, but he could not make himself stop. The cop was still staring in confusion.
Malcolm’s mouth laughed until his eyes wept.
“Get off of him!” Janeka was screaming.
She seemed far away, her voice barely audible behind the blood roaring like rapids in Bob’s ears. Presumably, the man who sat straddling him could hear her just fine, but if so, he ignored her cries, concentrating instead on battering Bob with his heavy fists.
“Leave him alone!” Janeka said, still screaming.
The man on top of him snarled, apparently intent on holding Bob accountable for the sins of every white man since Columbus.
Bob managed to get his forearms up, turning his head this way and that, trying to dodge the blows. But the fists kept coming down like pistons.
Then, all at once, there was a sound like an axe makes when it splits a log and the blows stopped. Bob squeezed one eye open. He saw the man on top of him sway like a palm tree in a Hawaiian breeze, his eyes rolling up like a broken slot machine. Then he slid off Bob and fell onto the curb, insensate.
And Bob saw his girlfriend, his partner in the struggle for nonviolent social change, his colleague in a group whose middle name was “unarmed,” standing there with a broken, bloodstained chunk of masonry so big she had to use both hands.
Janeka threw the masonry down and extended her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Can you walk?”
She braced him and he climbed through levels of dizziness and pain until he found his feet. “Lean on me,” she said and he did and they made their way down the street as police officers trotted past them. A child stood in the middle of Beale Street screaming for his mother and a policeman stood dumbfounded as some man on the other side of the street laughed crazily and then began to cry.
“We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” said Janeka.
He shook his head, and this brought a new explosion of pain. “Home,” he said. “You drive.”
“Bob, you might be hurt. Something might be broken. You have to see a doctor.”
“I will,” he said. “Just not here. Take me back to school. We’ll call an ambulance from there.”
“Bob,” she began.
“Home,” he said. “Please.”
So they walked. Beale to Hernando, down past the temple where sanitation men stood congregated, watching the disorder at the other end of the street. Some of the men looked toward them with concern as they passed on the far side of the street.
“Y’all okay?” one man yelled. “Y’all need help?”
Bob just lifted a hand and shook his head. He didn’t want their help. He simply wanted out of Memphis. Two blocks later, they turned onto the side street where his car was parked. Janeka fished his keys out of his front pocket and opened the passenger side door for him.
By the time she started the car, he was unconscious.
Bob awoke to the sound of Janeka asking a gas station attendant for directions to the nearest hospital. He touched her arm and she looked around. “I don’t want to go to a hospital here,” he said. “Just take me back to campus.”
“Bob, we’re in a city. Why would you want to go to some country doctor down in the boondocks?”
“I don’t want to go to a doctor here,” he said. His jaw had swollen and talking was difficult. “Take me back to campus. Will you do that? Please?”
With tears in her eyes, she nodded.
Bob slept again and this time when he woke, the car was parked in front of a diner on a dirt road he recognized. They were maybe five miles from campus. He craned his head to the right and saw Janeka in a phone booth. He touched his jaw. It was a grapefruit. He touched his temple. It was still tacky with blood.
Janeka saw him looking. She hung up the phone and got back in the car. “You got your wish,” she said. “We’re back near campus. But I had to call for an ambulance. I have no idea where the nearest hospital is.” There was a note of reproach in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The voice that came out of his swollen and injured face was heavy and slow and sounded nothing like his own.
“I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have just gone to a hospital in Memphis,” Janeka said.
“Memphis is insane,” said Bob in his new voice. “I just wanted to get out of there.”
She said, “A man on the radio said they’re probably going to bring in the National Guard.”
“Good,” said Bob.
“From what he said, it sounds like they’re already blaming Martin Luther King for the riot.”
Bob turned his head. He didn’t answer.
“Did you hear me? I said—”
Bob was watching as some white girl with a Confederate flag emblem on the back pocket of her jeans got out of a truck and went to the phone booth Janeka had just used. “I heard you,” he told Janeka without turning. “He didn’t start it—but he didn’t do anything to stop it.”
“Bob, what do you mean?”
Now he turned his ruined face back toward her. “He ran. He abandoned us.”
“But what could he have done? You saw that crowd. They were out of control.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just know I expected better.”
She shrugged. “Maybe you expected too much,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I respect the man and all the things he’s done. But at the end of the day, he is not Jesus, he does not walk on water, and he does not have all the answers. I get tired sometimes of people acting as if he does.”
This stunned him. After a moment he said, “So you don’t believe in Martin Luther King?”
Even as he said it, he realized he was speaking in the exact tone of wonder and disbelief he’d have used to ask if she no longer believed in Jesus. The little smirk that twisted her lips just then told him she had heard the same thing.
“I’m just saying,” said Janeka, “maybe it’s time to try something new. Some new philosophy, some new approach. I don’t know if he’s the right man for these times.”
The injury to his face prevented Bob’s jaw from dropping. But his mouth came open and he stared at her. He could not believe what he was hearing.
They sat in silence for long minutes. The girl with the Confederate flag patch finished her phone call, got back in her truck, and peeled out in a great cloud of dust. A moment later, Janeka said, “There’s something else I need to tell you.”
And for some reason, Bob felt his heart lurch sideways.
“What?” he asked. There was a slight tremble in his voice. From a distance, he could hear the cry of the ambulance siren.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” she said, “but today, all this sort of made up my mind for me.”
“What?” he asked.
“It’s not about you. I want you to know that.”
“What?” he pleaded. Tears were already in his eyes. They slid down, stinging the cuts on his cheek.
“Bob, don’t,” she said.
“What is it?” He needed to hear although somehow, he already knew. The siren was growing louder.
“I’m leaving school, Bob. I just…I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“But why?”
“I just don’t,” she said.
“Because of me? Because of us? Did I do something?”
“Everything is changing, Bob. The whole country, the whole world, everything is changing. I just don’t think this is the right place for me anymore.”
“‘The right place?’” He tried to laugh, but something strangled and desperate came out of him instead. “What is the right place, Janeka?”
She sighed. “I want to go to a black school,” she said. “Maybe even an all-girl school like Spelman.”
“What about us?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking away. And he heard it for the lie that it was. She knew, all right. She just could not make herself say.
And she still had not answered the most important thing. “But why?” he asked again.
The siren grew louder, grew until it filled all the spaces, and then abruptly shut off as the truck pulled next to them in a crunch of tires on dirt and rocks. Janeka sprang from the car as if escaping it. Bob heard her tell the attendant, “He’s right here,” and then two young white men in white uniforms were looking through the car window at him.
“What happened to you, bud?” one of them asked.
“He was in Memphis,” said Janeka, and at that, he saw one of the white men shoot the other one a look. “We were both in Memphis,” she corrected.
“Can you walk, bud?”
The attendant opened the car door and put a hand on Bob’s upper arm. He came out stiffly. His eyes never left Janeka.
“Why?” he asked her again.
She pretended not to hear. “Some big guy jumped on him and beat him pretty badly,” she told the attendant, who was leading Bob toward the back of the ambulance.
“Yeah,” replied the attendant in a dry voice. “I can see that.”
“Why?” Bob asked, still staring at her.
“Seems like he’s asking you a question, miss,” the attendant said.
She said, “Bob, we can talk more later. I still have your keys. I’ll park your car at the dorm and leave them with the monitor.”
They were helping Bob into the back of the rig. He climbed in with the painful, uncertain steps of an 80-year-old, turning slowly and sitting on the stretcher. Janeka stood there, looking small. The attendant put an icepack in Bob’s right hand, then lifted Bob’s hand to Bob’s temple. Bob hardly noticed. He made his strange new voice as loud as he could, as emphatic as he could.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why? Why?” His eyes had filled again with tears. Blood dripped from a reopened cut on his chin. The ambulance attendant was strapping a blood-pressure cuff on Bob’s forearm. Now, like Bob, he paused and waited.
Janeka came closer. She leaned into the rig, put her mouth next to his ear.
“I understand,” she whispered, “that you’re hurt and that you’re angry. But you know this is for the best. Everything is changing, Bob. Nothing is the way it used to be even a year ago. You saw that today, didn’t you? The old ways, the old stuff, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. It doesn’t work anymore. Maybe in another place and time, you and I would be…could be…” She gasped, unable to go on. She tried to step back, but he grabbed her hand.
Her eyes met his. “Don’t,” he said. “Please.”
She gave him a look he would carry to his grave—pain sorrow resignation pity. Maybe even love. Maybe. And she leaned in again and whispered in his ear.
“I have to,” she said. “I have to be with my people.”
She pulled back. And Bob heard himself whisper, “I thought I was your people, too.”
He didn’t know if she heard him. The ambulance door closed in the same instant he said it.
And just like that, she was gone.