The guest--what was his name? Agent Bauer demanded.
She showed him the card. It said, in plain block lettering, "Eric S. Galt, 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama."
AFTER HOLING UP in his room all weekend at the Szpakowski rooming house in Toronto, Eric Galt finally emerged that Monday morning and, according to his memoirs and other accounts, made his way down to the offices563 of Toronto's Evening Telegram. He told the front desk that he had come to look at back issues of the newspaper.
Soon he was led to the paper's reading room. How far back you interested in? the librarian asked.
Galt said he was interested in the 1930s, and the librarian indicated that would be on microfilm.
Galt was shown the microfilm machines, and soon a box arrived with reels dating back to the early 1930s. The librarian demonstrated how to work the machine, threading the brittle ribbon of plastic through the guides and sprockets. Galt flipped on the light and adjusted the focusing knob until a grainy world of black and white swelled into view.
For the next several hours, Galt advanced through the early 1930s, through the initial years of the Great Depression. He skipped over the headlines about Roosevelt, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the imprisonment of Al Capone, Amelia Earhart's transatlantic solo flight. Galt wasn't interested in news or sports, wasn't interested in history at all. With each day's paper, he always spun back to the same section: births and obituaries.
Galt was trolling for names--specifically, the names of baby boys born in the early 1930s in Toronto. As he scrolled through 1932, ten or more birth announcements caught his eye and he jotted down the particulars. One of them was named Ramon George Sneyd. "At the Women's Hospital," the paper said, "on Saturday, October 8th, to Mr. and Mrs. George Sneyd (nee Gladys Mae Kilner), a son, Ramon George." Communing with these faded names in the murky light of the microfilm screen, Eric Galt was frantically looking for a way to cease being Eric Galt: he was hunting for a new identity.
It's possible that he had gathered valuable tips from someone about how to obtain a new alias, but if so, Galt never revealed who it was. In any case, the methods Galt used were ludicrously simple. "I'd read somewhere,"564 he later said, "that Soviet spies in Canada routinely assumed the names of actual Canadians [by] taking them from gravemarkers or from the birthing notices in old newspapers. I'd been trying for years to get out of the United States on some system like this." It was a clever technique, but not exactly an esoteric one. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police report noted at the time, "Teenagers are adopting565 this practice to obtain birth certificates for persons over twenty-one years in order that they can frequent beverage rooms."
Satisfied with the day's catch, Galt left the reading room around noon with his collection of names and headed back for the Szpakowski rooming house. On his way, though, he likely made a brief expeditionary detour566--to roam through one of Toronto's graveyards.
THE GREAT SILENT march in Memphis came to rest at an echoey marble plaza beside city hall, where an aluminum stage and a powerful public address system had been erected beneath the city's official insignia--cotton boll and steamboat. Rosa Parks, the grandmotherly prime mover of modern civil rights, sat on the platform with Mrs. King, Teddy Kennedy, and other dignitaries as the rear of the march caught up and filled in the public square. It was still spitting rain, but occasionally sunshine would spear through the brooding clouds; as Southerners say, the devil was beating his wife.
Several hours of speeches commenced--labor speeches and political speeches, some dry and some fiery, but all exhorting the city to do the right thing and settle the strike so that King's death could be redeemed in some way and the fatigued nation could get back to its business.
The whole program was really directed at Henry Loeb, but the mayor wasn't showing his face to this hostile crowd. In fact, he probably wasn't even inside city hall. He had been up all night, negotiating with strike representatives, prodded along by Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, whom President Johnson had personally dispatched from Washington to serve as an envoy. The talks had dragged on until 6:00 a.m., but the city still had not reached a resolution. The sour garbage would keep piling up on the curbsides, filling the streets with rank odors, growing happy rats.
King's death in defense of garbage workers made a certain kind of metaphorical sense, especially to the clergymen in the audience, several of whom pointed out a deep biblical irony: Jesus Christ was crucified between two thieves, upon a mound of trash.
Now labor leaders, one after another, came to the stage and fulminated. The Memphis strike had clearly become a cause celebre not just for municipal workers but indeed for all labor organizations around the country: the AFL-CIO, the UAW, the UFWA, the USWA, the IUE--all had representatives on the stage. The whole scene was a white Southern businessman's worst nightmare: Reds encamped at city hall!
AFSCME's Jerry Wurf, who'd been up all night with Loeb in the negotiations, vowed: "Until we have justice567 and decency and morality, we will not go back to work." But it was the legendary Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers who got lathered up into a fever pitch. "Mayor Loeb," he said, "will somehow be dragged568 into the 20th Century!"
All this feisty union talk resonated with many in the audience, but Memphis was not a labor town--neither by tradition nor by style--so much of it soon fell on deaf ears. Besides, the person the crowds had really come to see was Coretta Scott King. Finally, after several hours, she obliged them. Introduced by Belafonte, she rose and addressed the crowd in a calm and level voice, keeping her remarks personal. She spoke of her love for her husband, and of his love for their children. She spoke of the brevity of life. "It's not the quantity569 of time that's important, but the quality," she said. She sounded only one bitter note when she raised the question: "How many men must die before we can have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take?"
Her composure was almost otherworldly. Out in the audience, people were weeping uncontrollably, but her voice never cracked. "If Mrs. King had cried570 a single tear," said one woman in the crowd, "this whole city would have give way."
Her time in Memphis had inspired her, Coretta King declared. The movement would go on; she had not lost faith. "When Good Friday571 comes, these are the moments in life when we feel there's no hope." She looked over at her children and said with a faint smile: "But then, Easter comes."
THAT EVENING, WHILE Coretta King was returning to Atlanta, the FBI agents Neil Shanahan and William Saucier572 pulled up to 2608 Highland Avenue in Birmingham. "Economy Rooms," the little sign said out front. The two agents rapped on the door of the large pale gray two-story stucco rooming house located in the foothills of Birmingham, not far from the famed colossus of Vulcan, whose deformed physique lorded over the steel city of the South. Peter Cherpes, the Greek-American who ran Economy Rooms, came to the door. Shanahan and Saucier explained that they were with the FBI and that they were looking for a man named Eric Galt who was supposed to be living there. The Birmingham field office had gotten both the name and the Highland address from an urgent report that the Memphis agents Darlington and Bauer had filed earlier in the day.
"Eric Galt," Cherpes repeated. His mind sifted and turned. Yes, he remembered an Eric Galt. He had been a tenant at the Economy Rooms for about six weeks last year. The seventy-two-year-old Cherpes shuffled back to retrieve his three-by-five index registration cards, but they were in disarray, and he was unable to locate Galt's information.
Still, Cherpes was happy to tell the agents what he knew. Galt had stayed in room 14. He'd shown up sometime in the summer of last year--a quiet sort of guy, neatly dressed, usually wore a suit and tie. He said he was "on vacation," cooling it between jobs. He'd previously been down in Pascagoula, Mississippi, working for a company that manufactured big boats. "You couldn't imagine a nicer guy to have around," Cherpes said. "Paid the rent on time. Usually turned in early, didn't go out much. He never had telephone calls or visitors." Cherpes didn't remember Galt befrie
nding any of the other roomers. He had a way of keeping off to himself, aloof. Another boarder at Cherpes's establishment, a twenty-six-year-old man named Charles Jack Davis, had this to say about Galt: "I don't guess there's any such thing as a 'typical person,' but my memory of him is so dim."
In the mornings, Cherpes recalled, Galt would show up right at the end of the breakfast hour, when all the other guests had left. At night, Galt spent a lot of time in the rooming house lounge, watching television.
Did he have a car? Agent Saucier asked.
Cherpes thought for a second. Yes, matter of fact, Galt did drive a car. He couldn't remember the make, but Cherpes recalled with some conviction that it was a white car of some kind. Galt checked out sometime in November, and he'd never returned. "I've gotten a couple pieces of mail for him since he left," Cherpes said. "I just sent them all back to the postman."
Did Galt say where he was going?
"Down to Mobile, or someplace like that. Said he'd gotten a job on a boat."
36 THE MAN FURTHEST DOWN
FOR THREE AND A HALF miles,573 the mourners crept through the azalea-bright streets of Atlanta. Under cloudless skies, a crowd of more than 150,000 tromped from Ebenezer Baptist Church toward Morehouse College, past Auburn Avenue, past downtown, past the gold-domed capitol, where Governor Lester Maddox, an ardent segregationist, was holed up with phalanxes of helmeted state troopers. Occasionally, the governor, who a few days earlier had suggested that King arranged574 his own murder, would part the blinds and stare disgustedly at the passing parade.
At the head of the procession, a cross of white chrysanthemums was carried along, and just behind it a team of Georgia farm mules pulled an old wooden wagon bearing the casket of polished African mahogany. King's lieutenants walked with the mule skinners--Abernathy and Lee, Bevel and Orange, Williams and Young--wearing blue denim to symbolize the hard rural folk at the heart of the coming Poor People's Campaign. It was April 9, 1968--Tuesday morning, one day after the silent march in Memphis and five days after the assassination.
Spectators watched from curbsides, from rooftops, from front porches, from the plate-glass windows of small businesses along the route. The best view, however, was probably on national television. All three networks were covering the funeral live, and more than 120 million people were said to be watching around the world. Half of America had taken leave from work; not just government offices and schools and unions and banks, but even the New York Stock Exchange had called the day off, the first time in history that Wall Street had so recognized a private citizen's death. Roulette wheels in Las Vegas would take a two-hour rest.
"Black Tuesday," people all over the country were calling this day of lamentations. April 9 was already a date etched into the national consciousness, a date fraught with racial overtones; it was, after all, the anniversary of Appomattox. A movement was now building to declare a permanent national holiday in King's name, and other ideas were floated to rename parks, office buildings, highways, and whole neighborhoods after the martyred leader. (California politicians, for example, proposed rechristening the riot-scarred Watts section of Los Angeles as "Kingtown.")
In many senses, the ceremony in Atlanta was the equivalent of a head-of-state funeral. Scores of chartered planes, and hundreds of chartered buses, had come to Georgia--disgorging every kind of commoner and every kind of royal. Several hundred garbage workers from Memphis were on hand, but also Rockefellers and Kennedys. Among the dignitaries in the swarming crowds were six presidential contenders, forty-seven U.S. congressmen, twenty-three U.S. senators, a Supreme Court justice, and official delegations from scores of foreign countries. Hollywood turned out in full force as well--Marlon Brando was there, and Paul Newman, and Charlton Heston, and any number of directors and producers. One could also spot a fair cross section from the upper registers of black sports and entertainment--Aretha Franklin, Jackie Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Brown, Stevie Wonder, Floyd Patterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Belafonte, Poitier. Towering a foot or more above everyone else, wearing dark black shades that did nothing to camouflage his well-known visage, was Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain.
It was a day of odd juxtapositions, to be sure--at one point Richard Nixon was reportedly seen mingling with the actress Eartha Kitt, then playing the role of Catwoman on the popular television series Batman--but for anyone who had any connection to black America, or who wanted black America's vote, the funeral of Martin Luther King could not be missed. Stokely Carmichael, long a critic of King, drew stares from conservative church folk as he slipped into the church, wearing a dignified black Nehru jacket.
Jackie Kennedy was probably the most sensational guest in attendance. She had dropped by the King house earlier that morning to pay her respects to Coretta in person. The two national widows took leave of the crowded kitchen and repaired to a bedroom for a few minutes of semi-private conversation--"leaning toward each other,"575 wrote a Newsweek reporter, "like parentheses around the tragic half decade." What they said to each other is lost to history, but as one witness who passed by in the hall put it, likely in terrific understatement: "There was a powerful mood576 in the room."
The most notably absent dignitary, on the other hand, was Lyndon Johnson. Over the preceding few days, the president had hemmed and hawed, he'd sent a dozen mixed signals, he'd listened to Secret Service agents who whispered of threats in the air and implored him to consider that the country couldn't take another assassination. But the truth was, Johnson didn't want to go to Martin Luther King's funeral. Although the two figures had made history together, the president could not quite bring himself to honor the man who'd so brazenly undermined him on Vietnam. In his stead, Johnson sent Vice President Hubert Humphrey and stayed in Washington.
That morning at Ebenezer Baptist, the family had held a "small" service of a thousand people. (That was all the modest church could hold, but tens of thousands gathered outside and listened over loudspeakers.) The eulogy was odd and beautiful not so much for what was said as for who was doing the eulogizing--Martin Luther King Jr. himself. The family played a tape recording from one of King's last sermons at Ebenezer, in which he talked poignantly about his own death and how he wanted to be remembered. "If any of you are around when I meet my day, I don't want a long funeral," King said at one point to the audience's soft chuckle--and if that was truly his wish, he most assuredly was not getting it. The service went on and on, and this was only the first part of an all-day extravaganza of mourning. Bored and restless, little Bernice buried herself in Coretta's lap through most of the Ebenezer service, but when she heard her father talking, she perked up. Confused, she looked over at the open coffin to make sure he was still lying there, unmoving, and then slumped back in her mother's arms until the service let out.
Bernice and the other King children--Martin III, Dexter, and Yolanda--had been smothered with goodwill these past few days. True to his word, Bill Cosby had flown to Atlanta and personally entertained them at the house. The King children had received untold thousands of letters and telegrams from all around the world. "Dear Yolanda," one twelve-year-old girl wrote, "I believed in your father577 down to the bottom of my soul." Said a grade-schooler named Robert Barocas from Great Neck, New York: "Dear Dexter--if they catch the guy578 who shot your father, give him a sock in the mouth for me."
Now the four King children slipped out of Ebenezer with their mother, just ahead of the mourners. On Auburn Avenue, most of the flags flew at half-staff, but some flew upside down, sending a message not of sorrow but of bitterness and defiance. Along the funeral route, angry mutterings could be heard: Johnson had done it. Hoover had done it. Wallace had done it. The Klan, the White Citizens Council, the Memphis Police Department. The Mafia, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the generals who ran the war King had condemned. In a society already marinated in conspiracy, it was only natural that every form of collusion would be bruited about. Now, with each step the mourners took toward Morehouse, King's
death seemed to gather further layers of mystique.
Throughout his civil rights career, King had drawn symbolic meaning and practical power from an Old Testament analogy: he was a black Moses, parting the waters, leading his people on their great exodus out of Egypt. It was an image he consciously and repeatedly invoked, even in his last speech in Memphis--I may not get there with you but we as a people will get to the Promised Land. With his assassination, however, the analogy suddenly shifted to the New Testament: King had become a black Jesus, crucified (during the Easter season, no less) for telling society radical truths. If this new analogy was to carry any biblical resonance, then the entire apparatus of the state and culture must be complicit in the Messiah's death--King Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Levites and the Pharisees, the long arm of the Roman Empire.
So as the two mules kept up their doleful clip-clop through Atlanta, the questions multiplied through the ranks of the marchers. The whole power structure, the whole zeitgeist, seemed implicated. As Coretta herself said, "There were many fingers579 on the rifle."
Even the most alert and conspiracy-tuned observer could not have guessed one irony along the funeral route: late that morning, the cortege passed within a few blocks of the Capitol Homes housing project, where, still sitting locked and abandoned in the parking lot, a white hardtop Mustang with Alabama plates shimmered in the eighty-degree heat.
NEARLY A THOUSAND miles due north, Eric Galt was in his room on Ossington Avenue580 with a growing collection of Toronto newspapers. He was half watching the coverage of the King funeral on the console television while working on a letter to the registrar of births--a letter that he would mail later that day.
The networks sprinkled the funeral coverage with periodic bulletins about the manhunt and also updates on the rioting, which--in most places at least--had finally ended. The statistical tally emerging from the smoldering ruins was staggering: Fires had erupted in nearly 150 American cities, resulting in forty deaths, thousands of injuries, and some twenty-one thousand arrests. In Washington alone, property damages were estimated at more than fifty million dollars. Across the nation, close to five thousand people had become "riot refugees."
Hellhound on His Trail Page 29
