Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  And I realized: the frenzy at the check-in counters, the surly shoving, the being herded together…

  That was real! That was people.

  What we were flying toward, silent and unknown…what we believed in…what we were going to do…that was a thought. In a frightening and inescapable way, it did not exist. And I knew, really: these people did not have to like each other, or love each other; they were all aliens, moving toward a dream.

  But dreams cannot be populated. Only hard realities can know presence. And I felt alone.

  For down there in Montgomery, Alabama, was the reality. This was the dream, and the fact that it did not exist terrified me. The ones who lived in that state, did so all the time, not just for a day, or a week, and then away to the hills of Hollywood where there was safety; and I grew cold thinking that we were about to invade their reality.

  We were to meet the original Three Hundred who had hiked the full fifty miles on U.S. Highway 80 out of Selma. All the marchers from everywhere who had come to this spot, were to meet three miles outside the city limits, at the City of St. Jude, a hospital and school. My first glimpse of it was chilling, for surely this must have been the impression given to the condemned of Europe when first they glimpsed Dachau or Buchenwald. Outside a high cyclone fence, members of the federalized Alabama National Guard (the Dixie [31st] Division) stood at parade-rest every fifty feet. Inside that fence, the bivouac area seemed somehow—wrong. The grounds were clotted with great clumps of people, two and three hundred in a bunch, ragtag, disordered. Mud was everywhere. The thick, sucking red mud of Alabama had been churned to cream by thousands of feet walking over it endlessly since the day before. It was a concentration camp. Those soldiers, they weren’t turned outward, to protect the people inside…

  Once we were inside, I tried asking the troopers two questions. I walked across the empty corner far away from all the waiting people, and approached three standing together. Two walked away. “At what intervals have they spaced you out around the fence?” I asked.

  “Ah don’ know.”

  “Are you elements of the federalized Alabama Guard?”

  “Ah don’ know.”

  Then he moved away. I stared after him. God save us from men who do what they despise doing, simply because they are ordered to do it.

  Later, I was to understand even more clearly my fear and horror at these Southerners pressed into a service of hatred, for the only moment of genuine danger I knew came from them.

  We were to have started marching the last three miles into Montgomery and the Capitol Building at 9:00. It was eleven before we moved. Stacked up in long lines, eight abreast, we stood in the mud, waiting, and then it started to rain. It misted down on us, and the umbrellas came out, the scudgy raincoats that had been jammed in knapsacks and bedrolls. A sound truck nearby suddenly began blaring…a Negro comic who did lousy impressions…and he wouldn’t stop…he just kept imitating Wallace, FDR, Ralph Bunche, LBJ, Dr. Paul Tillich, and every few shticks were interspersed with snarling references to how “whitey” was a sonofabitch. It was ill-timed, in bad taste. All of us who had come to do what we could, to serve, to offer ourselves without any of the usual white man’s impetuosity to run things. We stood there, and the comic rasped at us, till there were murmurings of marching not on the capitol, but on the sound truck.

  Then the Original Three Hundred in their fluorescent orange road-workers jackets, bearing American flags, began moving out, and with a sense of elation just to be afoot, we moved out after them. Wave after wave, rank upon rank, little children clutching hands, women still carrying their brown paper bags of food, black men and white men, all teeth and flashing eyes, moving out onto the Jefferson Davis Highway. Sporadic singing broke out. We’d been on our feet four hours now. Ahead of me, one-legged Jim Letherer of Saginaw, Michigan crutch-propelled himself forward, grinning.

  A group of Montgomery teen-agers had fastened themselves to a small knot of us from Los Angeles, and as we marched, for the first time we heard their songs:

  “In your heart you know

  you’re wrong…

  In your heart you know

  you’re wrong…

  In your heart you know

  you’re wrong…

  In Montgomery, Ala-bam-a!”

  And followed by a chant to which The Jerk could be danced. It was a strange, demanding chant—Hoop-de-hoop…hoop-de-hoop…hoop-de-hoop—and then a dire, threatening, challenging Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. It was the old strike-breaker’s chant, warning and intimidating. We’re coming. We’re waiting for you. We want you to try something…go ahead…break out that cane and cattle prod, this time we’ll see who gets a split skull hoop-de-hoop hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.

  The march went down U.S. 80 and into the Negro section.

  Picture every cliche of poverty and sadness. Let them steep in the cauldron of your most imaginative thoughts. They cannot approach the reality of the squalor in which the black men and women of Montgomery, Alabama live. Houses that have never seen paint, grey slatboard houses without foundations, where it isn’t necessary to use a dust-pan after sweeping: the dirt falls through the cracks in the floor. Where wallpaper is made of newspaper, and you can stand inside that crackerbox and feel the March wind whistle chilly in at you. There were few fat people. There was a total absense of the treasured bigot’s cliche: “They live in filth, but they all got big Caddys.” There were no Caddys. But there were desiccated old men sitting on porch steps wearing clean but threadbare clothes. There were tiny children with their heads bound up in silk stockings to make “the kink lie back.” There were filthy open sewers in front of every house, because the municipal government didn’t see any need for adequate sewage disposal. There were shockingly inadequate shopping facilities—little stores with their inevitable Coca-Cola signs that said JOHN’S GRO. under the advertisement. The only things in that section that were sharp and fresh-looking, the Coca-Cola signs. God bless American industry, the pervasive love of the Corporation!

  A roadside sight: ten little tiny children, scrupulously clean, clapping their little hands and singing in small bird voices as a ten-thousand-year-old Negro man with a cane led them in “We Shall Overcome.” And no smiles on their faces.

  The smiling was all being done in the marching column. By the roadside, Negroes who were terrified they would be burned out, lynched or lose their jobs if they marched (as subsequent days have revealed to be accurate guesstimates), watched silently. From porches and sidewalks—euphemism for cracked bits of pale rock—they stared at the endless stream of humanity come to pledge allegiance to their cause. And as the chanting, singing masses moved past, they would suddenly burst into a moment of hand-clapping or singing, then realize Fear had settled behind them, watching, and they would subside again. It was eerie, and tragic.

  A toothless old woman, lushed out of herself, ran alongside the column, chittering merrily. She grabbed at me, tried to pull me out of the line, tried to hug me, just out of sheer delight that we existed, that we were there. “C’mon in, old mother! C’mon in, there’s room!” yelled Paul Robbins, the photographer who had gone down to Alabama with me. Everybody laughed, and capered, and she clapped her withered hands in childlike abandon. We passed her by, and she smiled gap-mouthed at others, who borrowed her sunshine.

  A Montgomery high school girl marching beside me pointed to a beat-up commercial building with the sign LAICOS CLUB on it. “That’s where we get to go for music,” she said. It was a simple statement, but it was filled with hatred. That was the one place they were allowed to go. We turned a corner in the red mud and suddenly better pavement began.

  The lower middle-class white neighborhood. The perceptible transition from Nigger Town to Po’ White Trash.

  It was only a cultural half-step up from the shameful ghetto we had just left, but here we found the most vicious attitude of all…

  [When I was in the army, stationed in Georgia, I once had a dirt-dumb White Trash PFC explain somet
hing to me. “I’m poor,” he said bitterly, “real poor, as poor as y’c’n get. And I got no education, and I got nothin’ back home but gettin’ laid an’ gettin’ old. I ain’t better than nothin’, man, nothin’ at all. I’m just about as bad as mud, but there’s one thing I’m better than…I’m better than a nigger, and I intends to see it stays that way.” Nutshell explanation of the Southern States Rights argument against Civil Rights.]

  On a porch, a man and his wife, sipping tea, blissfully unaware of a freedom march. Their world was up there. And down on that road, there wasn’t nothin’ happening. There ain’t nothing going on down here in Alabama, they said over television the preceding Sunday. Nothin’ atall. What the hell did he think all that going on down on the road was? Locust?

  Past a Negro school. Children hanging out of windows, screaming jubilantly, urging us forward, teachers waving, crying with joy, give ’em hell! The name of the school in bold letters: LOVELESS SCHOOL. Yeah.

  Around a corner. Up on the verandah of a resident hotel, a gaggle of middle-class white women, the cream of Southern womanhood.

  “Nigger-lovers!” the blonde screamed, harridan.

  “Mother fu—” the words were drowned out by the chants of the “lower class” Negro marchers, “Go tell George Wallace, go tell George Wallace, go tell George Wallace, ain’t no one gonna turn me around…”

  The third woman was so overcome with hate and the bubbling inarticulateness of the need to see us all dead, corpses strewn from one end of US 80 to the other, that all she could do was turn her backside to us, wiggle, and pretend to be breaking wind.

  “You got nothin’ but class, madame,” I yelled. “K-L-A-Z.” And we went past. Frightened? No, not then.

  I wanted a glass of water. The sun had come out, and it was hot. “Christ, I’d like a glass of water,” I murmured. “Why don’t you go up on that porch and ask them white folks?” one of the kids gibed, a student from Tuskegee.

  I grinned back at him. “Will it cause trouble for the march?” He shook his head. “No, but it gonna cause trouble for you.”

  I loped off out of the line as everyone in the vicinity passed the message; the white boy’s goin’ up to ask for a glassa water…he’ll never get it.

  Behind me, the column slowed and halted, jamming up as everyone watched, waiting for trouble, almost anxious for it, perhaps. Down the street, at the resident hotel, the klaz women craned over the railing to see what was happening. I trotted up to the front steps of the house. There were three women sitting there in chairs. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said to the fat one, “might I trouble you for a glass of water, please.” She stared at me uncomprehendingly. What the hell was this Northern Jewish Communist asking her? She didn’t speak, couldn’t speak? “A glass of water, ma’am?” I repeated.

  The redhead next to her leaned over. “He says he wants a glass of water. Please.” The fat one heaved herself out of the chair, went inside the screen door. The redhead came over to me.

  “We aren’t all as bad as they tell you we are down here,” she said, and seemed infinitely, genuinely sad about it.

  “As bad as what, ma’am?” I asked, playing boyish and cute.

  “Well, just like, you know, them others, like they tell you.”

  “Who tells me, ma’am?”

  “You know. We just aren’t all that bad, honest.”

  “Yes ma’am.” I smiled at her. “But some of you are, and if you sit back and let them ruin your lovely state, then you’re as guilty as they are. I came all the way from Hollywood, ma’am, just to see if I could help.” She stared at me. I’d used a magic word. Hollywood. Then I wasn’t a Communist. A black-loving Jew, probably, but not a Communist. And I had such nice manners, and I obviously wasn’t a beatnik. The fat one came out with the water. I took a long, deep pull from the kitchen glass and returned it. “Thank you, very very much, ma’am,” I said and smiled, allowing the left-cheek dimple to show itself.

  “You just tell ’em we gave you a glass of water.” The redhead smiled, thinking she was sewing it up.

  And if I’d been black? I thought. I didn’t say it, because the idea was to show them there were other ways to do it, not to antagonize them. I loped back to the line of marchers and fell in, the line moved out again, and I repeated what had been said. They weren’t all that bad down here. The Negro student turned a look of venom and truth on me, “Don’t you fall for that okey-dokey,” he warned me.

  Hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.

  We turned down onto the main drag. Dexter Street. Past the Jeff Davis Hotel. The whites standing at every curb, and the rednecks, the denim-clad, white-shirted men, giving us the finger. “Where you want freedom from, boy?” a redneck murmured at me from the sidelines. “New York? Philadelphia? Chicago?” I smiled at him…frig you, Jack.

  Past the Paramount Theatre. Elvis Presley in Girl Happy. “That isn’t one of ours,” the Negro high school girl said. My heart went cold in me. It’s so easy to forget.

  Past the J.J. Newberry five and dime. The second floor housed the Montgomery Citizens Council offices. They had a gigantic poster hanging out the window. It showed Martin Luther King with some other people, and it said MARTIN LUTHER KING / COMMUNIST!

  Hoop-de-hoop. Hoop-de-hoop.

  A white waitress in a restaurant, peering out of the window at me. I smiled at her, winked. She grinned back. We flirted. If I wanted to stay down here for a few days, I could spread the gospel, seed the populace, lift that barge, tote that bale.

  The upstairs window of the Pontiac Agency. A man in a grey suit. “Go back where you come from, you mammy-jammin’ nigger-lovin’ sonsabitches…y’goddam…” Ah, South’n hospitality.

  The kids behind us were doing a freedom chant to a tune that was ready-made for The Jerk. There was dancing in Dexter Street. Another dance. The Twine. And a third. The Shotgun. Yeah!

  The last lap. As we came down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the end of the square and the Capitol, someone pointed and yelled. Atop the Capitol Building. No American flag. The Alabama State Flag, crossed diagonal red bars on a white field. And underneath: the stars and bars of the Confederacy. Governor George, Governor George, how does your arrogance grow? With shotgun shells and lynch mob yells, and flauntings of America, all in a row!

  We listened to the speeches, all of them. They droned on for hours, and in the parlance of show biz, they “lost their audience”. But it didn’t matter, we were with them all the way. They could have recited “Jabberwocky.” Until Jimmy Baldwin introduced King. Baldwin had once had training as a preacher. It told. Shadrach and his kin went to the furnace once more, and from the heat came Martin Luther King, who said all there was to say. We had stood there, slumped there, lain there, sitting thousand upon thousand while the Army spotters on the rooftops stared down at us—

  Put a machine gun up there on the Montgomery Safety Building, another on the roof of the facing office building, and a third set of two cross-rigged in the Capitol Building, and just track across, spraying, and we could spread them nigger-loving bastards curb to curb in their own blood.

  —and Wallace’s head thug, Al Lingo, moved around the crowd, incognito. We were pigeons, had Wallace wanted to pull another Sharpesville Massacre. Added to it was the fact that those “protecting” Alabama National Guardsmen (with their flag of the Confederacy sewn over the heart above the US Army patch) were all facing inward, not outward. Protection?

  Footnote: I submit it was a calculated bit of strategy, mobilizing the Dixie Division. Whether as a subliminal punishment—having to guard the very people who threatened their way of life—or as a warning to the invaders that down under that khaki even the troopers were Wallace’s Boys. Whichever, let it herewith be noted that every one of them was gimlet-eyed, beast-faced, thick-necked, jaws twitching with restrained fury as King lacerated their Alabama bigotry.

  And the singing…God, the singing! Fifty thousand, led by Belafonte. George was hiding up in the Capitol, peeking through the Ven
etian blinds. I wonder if Governor George enjoyed the entertainment as much as he had the darkies singin’ in de moonlight?

  Behind me, inside the sawhorse barricades, I heard an old Negro man and his wife talking. “It ain’t never gonna be the same here again,” he said.

  His wife shook her head. “They ain’t gonna lay down and die.” Bitter realism, in the midst of a dream.

  He shrugged, gently repeating, “Still, ain’t never gonna be the same here again.”

  I pulled out a salami and a water bottle from the knapsack. Then I remembered the water bottle was empty, and borrowed one from James Goldstone, a television director who had felt it was time to pay some dues. We cut up the salami and passed it around. One of the Negro kids grinned: “Kosher?” “It was when we left L.A.,” Goldstone said and leered. We all ate, and passed the water bottle. The Negroes would not drink after the white folk. Old horrors die slowly.

  When it was over, we were directed to an empty lot where buses were supposed to come to get us, to shuttle us back to the Montgomery airport for the flight home. I had wanted to stay down several days, to see what the aftermath would be like, but they pleaded with everyone to cut out, quickly. Perhaps they knew something like what was waiting for Viola Liuzzo might befall us.

  We waited in the empty lot a long, long time, three hundred and more of us. The buses did not come. The troops were spaced out all along behind us, threatening, menacing. “I want a Coke,” I said to Paul Robbins. There was a gas station two blocks down. “Jeezus, don’t go down there!” someone warned. There was no fear, somehow. We started walking down.

  As we passed the lines of army troops, they began clicking the safety catches off their old M-1 rifles. Stupid bastards, were they trying to scare us? I knew they had no ammunition in those pieces. They weren’t even wearing clip holders for spare ammo. Stupid bastards. And they muttered underbreath:

  “Nigger lover.”

  “Go back where you come from, sonofabitch fuc—”