To commemorate Reverend King I am posting two consecutive chapters from my novel.
The steady drumbeat of historical determination
Helen scanned the room for the young man she had met at the luncheonette but didn’t see him. She took a seat next to a woman who also was a Master’s degree student and who also intended to become a history teacher. Her name was Margaret Martin; they had joked about her having the same initials as Marilyn Monroe.
The professor, who was young, no more than thirty-five, tapped the microphone on the podium. “I am going to be lecturing today, as you know from your syllabus, on the migration north and will be showing you some slides of the migration series by the painter Jacob Lawrence. As slides, they are just notions of the paintings which I would urge you to see for yourself in Washington and New York but then again much of life is notions.”
He touched the knot of his tie, a ritual gesture. Helen thought of her husband. Men and knots.
“But before I start, I want to say some words about what is going on right now. As you may know, if you have been following the news, Martin Luther King Jr. is in Memphis, Tennessee, to lend his support to a strike on the part of sanitation workers there. Again, as you may know, on February 1 two black sanitation workers were crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of the truck they were working on was triggered accidentally. This happened on a rainy day and the men were sitting in the back of the truck to keep out of the rain. Some people refer to these workers as garbage men and there is no doubt that what went into that truck could be foul and disgusting. They were doing work, however, that needs to be done and is as important as what any person does in this world, more important in ways because there were no notions in their work. They were doing something actual which this society depends upon.”
Every face was turned forward. There were two black students out of seventy or so.
“Since then the workers have rallied to seek better conditions, wages and pensions. The mayor has been adamantly opposed to their demands. As far as he is concerned they have no right to strike. They should be satisfied with their lot. His philosophy, a word much too high-tone for what is occurring there, is paternalism—a word with which you are familiar in our studies in this class, if you weren’t familiar with it already. He thinks he is doing those workers a favor and he thinks he is doing white people a big favor by keeping these men in their place. A reverend in Memphis who is a veteran of the civil rights movement invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Memphis and focus the nation’s attention on what is occurring there. He spoke to the workers and their supporters and he has promised to do more, to lead a larger march. Meanwhile garbage is piling up and many men who didn’t have much to begin with are doing without that. And I, a white man and a professor to boot, am standing here talking to you.”
Not a sound in the large room.
“I don’t know what you think about Martin Luther King, Jr. I think it is extraordinary that we have such a person among us. I was raised in the Episcopal church and some days I am proud of that and some days I’m not sure at all about the God I worship. Dr. King is sure about that God and he is sure of the nonviolence he has espoused and lived by. There is hate all around us and hate within us waiting patiently to be activated. It takes a great deal to get beyond that hate and to see that peace is a place where we could live. Dr. King’s vision is about that place. Right now, Memphis is not that place but we must hope—which I assume is the reason we are all here today in this room studying the history that we are studying—that there can be such a place.”
He looked out at his students then wagged his head a bit as if waking from a dream.
“He needs to compose himself,” said Margaret Martin to Helen. “To go on.”
“In speaking of the migration north we need to first interrogate the word ‘migration,’ what is in that word, what were the circumstances of so many people leaving the South.”
Once more, Helen felt there was nothing as strangely visceral as history.
* * *
History speaking
Sometimes Tom picked up the newspaper on his way upstairs after work and a few cursory words with whoever was up, though sometimes more than cursory, sometimes about the news. He more or less kept up in that department. Too much could swamp a person, wars, refusals, denials, disagreements, filibusters, denunciations, all acting as if they were achievements. And there loomed his personal news, that envelope from the government, the Thomas Brownson Special Edition.
So the excerpts from a speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. had given in Memphis, Tennessee, made him pause—something worth his time. Settled on his bed, he placed the page in his lap and read:
“We are tired of our children having to attend overcrowded, inferior, qualityless schools. We are tired of of having to live in dilapidated, substandard housing conditions where we don’t have wall to wall carpet, but so often end up with wall to wall rats and roaches. We are tired...smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. We are tired of walking the streets in search of jobs that do not exist. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate to the basic necessities of life. . . .We are tired.”
Reverend King wasn’t addressing Tom’s life but there was a human bridge there. And there was the unspoken question about what Tom would be fighting for on behalf of the United States. Oppression? Indifference? Racism? Those were words but they weren’t. People’s lives stood behind those words, people such as Reverend King was speaking to. Tom read the passage again. There was that cadence to the words. What was it called? A litany? “We are tired.” And where had he, Thomas Brownson, been? Why had he never bothered to look twice? Virtually every day he drove through Baltimore’s streets. He had eyes but he didn’t. He hadn’t seen into the heart of anything.
He put the paper on the floor and lay back on his bed. Reverend King was someone who not only told the truth but lived it. Tom lay on his comfortable bed in his comfortable house but that could change. No—it would change.