The Martin Luther King Mitzvah

by Tekulsky, Mathew;

  “You mean that good deed thing?” Sally asked.

  “It’s something you do to make others feel better, I guess. I’ve got to talk about it during the ceremony.”

  “You’re nice to me,” Sally said.

  “It’s got to be more than that,” I replied. “It has to be a moral good deed, something that makes the world a better place.”

  “Oh, you mean like a charity,” Sally said.

  “Something like that. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll think of something,” Sally said, waving as she turned onto Willow Avenue and I continued on to Oak Avenue.

  That night, I watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, and I saw images of American warplanes dropping bombs on Vietnam, and wounded soldiers being carried on stretchers. I remembered what Pete Seeger had sung during his concert and I thought, Maybe I should do something about this. I turned to my father, who was reading his copy of the Beachmont Times.

  “Dad,” I said, “I think I’ve found a mitzvah.”

  He kept reading without looking at me, and I wasn’t sure if he had even heard me.

  “Good, Adam,” he replied absently.

  I decided to talk to Grappa about it. When I got to Grappa’s house, he was putting a bumper sticker on his Buick Riviera.

  “I may lose some clients,” he said, “but I feel like I have to do this.”

  “Is it a mitzvah?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” he replied, standing back to admire his sticker: Save the country, stop the war.

  “Grappa?” I said, “do you think I could do something to stop the war, for my mitzvah?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. “Your parents may not be too happy about it, but you are becoming a man now, and you have to do what you think is right. What did you have in mind?”

  “I was thinking about handing out some anti-war flyers at school,” I said.

  “That’s a great mitzvah,” Grappa said. “I’m proud of you, Adam.”

  When I got home, I told my parents about Grappa’s bumper sticker, but not about my mitzvah idea.

  “He’s crazy,” my father muttered. “Stick your head out of a hole, and you’re gonna get it shot off.”

  My mother called Grappa on the telephone and tried to persuade him to take the sticker off his Buick.

  “It’s not our battle, Leonard,” she said—when she was mad at her dad, she called him by his first name. But Grappa wasn’t going to change his mind.

  I went to bed thinking about what Pete Seeger and Grappa stood for, and I figured I’d talk to Sally about it the next day at school.

  “I think we should talk to Mr. Roberts,” Sally confided when I told her what Grappa had done and about my idea. After English class, we approached Mr. Roberts’ desk.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Roberts, sir,” I began. “We were…or should I say, I was wondering if it would be okay to hand out some flyers at school.”

  “What kind of flyers?” Mr. Roberts asked.

  “Well…” I started, but Sally cut me off.

  “Anti-war flyers,” she said firmly. “Like what Pete Seeger was singing about.”

  “And what Stephen Crane was writing about in The Red Badge of Courage,” I added.

  A look of consternation appeared momentarily on Mr. Roberts’ face, before he broke into a smile. “How about you pass them out after school, on the sidewalk?” he said. “I think the school principal would like it better that way.”

  We decided that Sally would create the picture for the flyer and I would add the words. And what better place to work on it than over at Gladys’ house, in front of the fireplace, drinking a mug of hot chocolate? So on the following Saturday, the weekend before we intended to pass out our flyers, we marched off to Gladys’ house, I carrying the paper and Sally lugging her toolbox full of crayons and magic markers.

  Gladys thought our plan a marvelous idea. She put a Pete Seeger record on her turntable and we listened to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” as we started work.

  Sally pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and showed it to Gladys. “Our art teacher, Miss Palmer, knows this lady who drew this picture last year for a contest or something,” she said. “She told me that the lady wouldn’t mind if we used it for our flyer.”

  The paper had a drawing of a sunflower on it and the words, War is not healthy for children and other living things. Sally thought it would be a great idea to copy out this part of the poster. We decided to add the words Save the country, stop the war just as Grappa had done. Sally sat at the bridge table in the living room and got to work. Gladys went into the kitchen to get us some of Honey’s homemade oatmeal raisin cookies, and I sat at the bridge table and watched Sally draw the poster with her magic markers.

  “Hey, you two,” Gladys said as she placed a plate of cookies on the table, “I got an advance copy of the new Peter, Paul and Mary album from their manager. Want to hear it?”

  We both nodded, so Gladys put it on and we heard a song about leaving on a jet plane. It was kind of neat to hear it before anyone else did.

  “Don’t tell me you know Peter, Paul and Mary too?” I asked incredulously.

  “Of course,” Gladys replied. “I’ve known them for years. That’s one of the perks of being blacklisted. I got to know all the cool musicians.” She started to laugh and we joined in.

  By the late afternoon, Sally had completed her sunflower drawing. Instead of the original yellow, Sally had made her sunflower turquoise and the words beneath in red. By then, Peter, Paul and Mary were singing “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” so we all danced around in front of the fireplace.

  Chapter Ten

  On Monday after school, Sally and I trudged over to the Beachmont Times on the Boston Post Road so we could get our flyer printed. A man with spectacles stood at the front desk, going over some copy.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Williams, please,” I told the clerk.

  “Hold on, I’ll get him,” the man replied, before returning with an older gentleman in suspenders, who looked us both up and down.

  “Yes? And what can I do for you two?” Mr. Williams asked in a gruff but kind voice.

  Sally held up her sunflower painting. “Gladys said we should talk to you about printing this up,” she said.

  “Gladys McKinley?” Mr. Williams replied with a warm smile. “How is Gladys?”

  Taking Sally’s work, his face lit up. “I see she’s still a troublemaker,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “No, no, sir,” I corrected him. “This was our idea. We want to hand them out at school.”

  “I see,” Mr. Williams said. “I think we can help you with that.”

  He led us back through the newsroom where a few men sat at desks, busily typing, and led us into the printing room, where a large machine clanked out copies of the local paper. I was impressed by the fluid efficiency of the process, with the size of the rolls of blank paper as they were fed into the printing presses, and the thundering noise of the machines as they clickety-clacked out thousands of copies of the Beachmont Times.

  “Kids,” Mr. Williams shouted out over the din, “this is where it all happens. I just wanted you to see it!”

  Back in the newsroom, he showed us the photocopy machine that stood in the corner. “You can make copies here. How many do you need?” he asked. “Five hundred? A thousand?”

  “We just need enough for Beachmont Middle School,” I said.

  “I think five hundred will do,” Mr. Williams replied. “Yes, indeed. Color, I presume? It’s too pretty not to print it in color.”

  Sally nodded and Mr. Williams put her drawing on the glass, closed the top over it, and pressed a button. The machine started whirring and whirring and pretty soon paper came out of the other end and began to pile up in the tray alongside.

  “You kids
must be thirsty,” Mr. Williams said, and he pulled a couple of root beers out of a nearby refrigerator. “The only thing I drink,” he continued, handing each of us a soda. It tasted good, even on a cold day such as this one. He motioned for each of us to take a seat, and he sat down himself.

  “Now, do you think Gladys is ready to start publishing again?” he asked. “Ever since Harry died, she’s been a recluse. I think it’s time for her to come out of her shell, don’t you? She must be writing something in that big house on Beach Avenue.”

  When the copies were finished, Mr. Williams stacked them in a box and Sally and I walked back to Gladys’ house in the cold, with the box under my arm. The sunlight glittered on the snow that was piled alongside Beach Avenue, but the air was frigid.

  “You know what I think?” Sally said to me as we hurried up Gladys’ driveway toward the warmth of her kitchen. “I think Mr. Williams just did us a mitzvah.” We both laughed as she knocked on the door and Honey let us in.

  “You young people just never stop laughing,” Honey exclaimed. “What is it this time?”

  “We’re going to get Gladys to start publishing again, Honey!” I announced. “Mr. Williams wants her to write a column for the Beachmont Times.”

  When Gladys entered the kitchen, coming in to see what all the hubbub was about, she told us about Jack Williams.

  “Jack and Harry were buddies during the war,” she said. “They worked on the military newspaper the Stars and Stripes together. After the war, Harry went into advertising and Jack ran off to write the Great American Novel. He finally came back to Beachmont and took over as editor of the Times when old Johnny Edwards died.

  “He begged me to write for him during the blacklist,” Gladys continued, “but I knew that publishing my work at that time would have cost him his job. But that is all ancient history now. Did you get your flyers printed?”

  I retrieved a copy of the flyer from our box to show her. Gladys looked it over admiringly.

  “When are you kids going to hand these things out?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow,” Sally replied enthusiastically.

  We were fortunate because the following day was not only warmer but we got extra help handing out the flyers. After school, Jimmy, Sally, and I all stood at different doors outside of Beachmont Middle School and handed out our anti-war flyers to the kids as they exited the building. We were lucky that we had handed them out when we did, because the next day Beachmont was hit by a terrible winter storm that lasted through the following week. We got ten inches of snow, and I stayed inside a lot and listened to “Penny Lane” by The Beatles and “Happy Together” by the Turtles.

  I felt happy to be doing all of this great stuff with Sally and Jimmy; together we were handing out flyers against the war, trying to save our country, just as Pete Seeger had tried to do with his songs. If all the kids at Beachmont Middle School went home and showed our flyer to their parents, then the whole town would rise up against the war and maybe we could get the government to bring all of our troops home from Vietnam.

  Gladys told me that it was one thing to put a phrase on a flyer, but what I really needed to do was to write something about the war. So I decided to write an article for the school newspaper, The Tattler.

  When the snow stopped, I brought a flyer over to Grappa, and we made an eight-by-ten-inch print of the photograph I had taken of Pete Seeger. I brought the print down to Mr. Williams at the Beachmont Times, and he published the picture the following day and gave me a credit. When my father saw the paper, he smiled and said, “Well, you’ve done a mitzvah and you’re a published photographer. Now get back to work studying the Torah. Your bar mitzvah isn’t far off now.”

  I went upstairs to my room but I couldn’t concentrate on the Torah. I kept thinking about the war in Vietnam and about the differences between people, and what made them hate each other and kill each other. Then, before I knew it, I found myself walking over to my desk in my pajamas, and starting to write my article for The Tattler.

  Why do we need war to solve our differences? I began. That is really stupid. We should be able to talk things over to settle our disputes. That’s as far as I got before I started to feel drowsy, so I went over and lay down on my bed. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered why we couldn’t all just be happy together.

  Chapter Eleven

  During the last week of March, Gladys told us about a speech that her friend Martin Luther King was going to give at Riverside Church in New York City on the fourth of April. Honey sang all week in giddy anticipation, skipping during her vacuuming, and dancing a jig as she washed the dishes. Her face was wreathed in smiles for days before the event. My parents gave me permission to go, and Sally asked her dad; he agreed, although he was somewhat grumpy about it. Mom told me that Mr. Fletcher was a Republican, as was his father and his grandfather before that, but she was impressed when I told her that Mr. Fletcher had said it was okay for Sally to go.

  “I guess he feels that this man, Martin Luther King, must have something important to say,” Mom explained. “I don’t agree with Bill’s politics, but I give him credit for this one.”

  Mrs. Fletcher, however, was a Democrat and, after all, I had saved their son’s life. On top of that, Sally, stubbornly persistent as usual, told me that she intended to go with us even if her parents didn’t give her permission, so there!

  Mr. Williams printed another five hundred copies of the flyer, and Sally, Jimmy, and I put flyers into our neighborhood mailboxes. Meanwhile, Walter Cronkite reported that a whole bunch of soldiers and airplanes were involved in a big operation to clear out the Vietcong in Vietnam. It was called Operation Junction City, and it was the biggest U.S. air attack since World War II. Thousands of soldiers and civilians were getting killed, and there seemed to be no end to the war. As I watched casualties mount on my television screen, I began to get a sinking feeling of hopelessness. So many young men were dying, and it seemed as if the war would go on forever until there were no more young men left.

  One day, Gladys told me that President Eisenhower had warned the country about the military-industrial complex, where wars would be waged just so businessmen could make lots of money.

  “Can they really do that?” I asked.

  “They can if nobody says anything about it,” Gladys answered as she swept out her kitchen doorstep. I looked across at the chestnut tree in her front yard and I remembered what she had told me about the tree knowing nothing other than being a tree. Maybe the people who waged war knew nothing other than waging war. I started to become not just frustrated about the whole situation but angry about it as well.

  “It’s pretty clear that something has to be done to stop this crazy war,” Gladys told me as she leaned on her broomstick, “and if President Johnson isn’t going to pull us out of Vietnam, then the people will have to rise up and force him to do it.”

  When the day of Martin Luther King’s speech finally arrived, Honey drove us down the New England Thruway again. This time, we took the Cross Bronx Expressway and— instead of going south on the Major Deegan Expressway like Dad and I did when we went to see the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium—Honey drove over the Harlem River into Manhattan. From there we took the Henry Hudson Parkway down to Riverside Drive and 120th Street, to a church perched on the banks of the Hudson River with the tallest church tower that I had ever seen. It was a chilly evening and thousands of people were entering the church through massive wooden doors. We followed the crowd into the nave with its towering arches, rows of pews, and stained glass windows.

  I squirmed in my suit and Sally brushed her hair back, a yellow flower pinned above her right ear. Honey, sitting next to me, patted my knee.

  “Young man, you’re in for something now,” she said gleefully.

  I noticed that Honey started to breathe more quickly and she looked around at each side of the church just to take it all in. At one point
, she even held her hand over her heart, as if to calm herself. Looking up at the pulpit, I could see a banner hanging down—Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. I clutched my Leica in my lap, fervently hoping that I might get a photograph of Martin Luther King.

  Suddenly, at the front of the church, I could see Martin Luther King himself emerge from a side door and take the podium. When he started to speak, Sally and I, glancing at each other, were struck by a sense of awed disbelief. I don’t think either of us had ever heard anybody speak with such power. Although Martin Luther King didn’t speak loudly, the moral authority of his voice reached every corner of the church. He didn’t need to shout in order to make his point, but spoke to us as a minister would speak to his congregation when giving a sermon. Every face was turned toward him, every ear attentive. Looking around, I could see the rapt faces of the listeners, and began to understand the solidarity of everyone in that cavernous room, all united around Dr. King’s charismatic personality.

  Martin Luther King began his speech by thanking the group who had invited him to the church. Then he went on to say that the time had come for clergy and laymen alike to speak out against the war in Vietnam. Silence now, he said, was a form of betrayal.

  Honey patted me on the knee again. “See,” she whispered excitedly, “I told you!”

  Martin Luther King proceeded to explain how the war in Vietnam was killing a lot of people who should be our brothers. The war was costing us so much that we couldn’t help the poor people at home anymore, and, if that wasn’t enough, our country would become known forever for dropping bombs on people instead of liberating them.

  Near the end of his speech, Martin Luther King called on the United States government to end the bombing in Vietnam and to set a date for our troops to come home. He said that if we continued to spend more money on military rather than social programs, then our nation would be propelled toward a spiritual death. Everybody started clapping, and the clapping went on for a long time. I looked over at Sally, Gladys, and Honey—they were clapping with great enthusiasm. Honey had tears in her eyes. I applauded too, clapping so hard and so long that my palms stung. Martin Luther King finished his speech by assuring us that if we made the right decision, then the path of justice and righteousness would spread ever more quickly across the world. The clapping began again in a thundering roar of approval. Gladys had tears streaming down her face. I took a quick photograph of Gladys, before Honey took my hand, and Gladys took Sally’s hand, and we went to stand in line to meet Martin Luther King. He recognized Gladys, a wide smile crossing his face, as he hugged her. Then he hugged Honey, kissed her on the cheek, and looked down at Sally and me.