by Caryl Rivers
Washington had not seen anything like it before. Twenty-one chartered trains had pulled into Union Station that morning, and buses poured through the Baltimore tunnel, heading south to Washington, at the rate of one hundred per hour. A young Negro man had come on roller skates all the way from Chicago, wearing a banner with the word FREEDOM on it. An eighty-two-year-old man had ridden his bicycle from Ohio to the nation’s capital.
The high, clear voice of Joan Baez singing “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome” piped over the public address system as Mary looked around her in amazement. She was standing with Jay and Don; they had come with the Belvedere contingent on a charter bus an hour earlier, and how they would ever find it again in this crush remained problematic.
“I had no idea it would be so big,” Don said, looking at the throngs of people, black and white, milling around on the Monument grounds.
Indeed, there had been apprehension in some quarters about the march. John Kennedy hoped it would be large enough to build a groundswell of support for his civil rights bill, on which he had now staked the prestige of his presidency. J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the FBI, with his pathological hatred of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, had warned Washington notables to expect violence. (Hoover, who had files bursting with damaging material on the president’s sex life, used them to extract the authority to put wiretaps on King; Kennedy had secretly warned King about the taps. It was a treacherous game with the highest of stakes.) On the Hill, the mood on the eve of the march was psychic terror, as if hordes of marauding Negroes were set to sweep through the city like Genghis Khan and his Mongols. Malcolm X denounced the march as puppetry, in which a white president was simply using Negro leaders for his own cynical political ends. Four thousand troops were stationed in the suburbs, backed up by 15,000 paratroopers on alert in North Carolina. The Washington Senators’ baseball games were canceled, some stores barred their doors and the sale of liquor was banned for the first time since Prohibition.
What few people had expected was what was actually happening: an explosive outpouring of hope and good humor, Negroes and whites walking along, often hand in hand, singing and praying, in an atmosphere that was as far from terror as a county fair.
“How many people do you think are here?” Don asked Jay. Jay shook his head. “There has to be at least two hundred thousand here already. And they just keep coming.”
“Man, oh, man,” Don said. “Look at it. Just look at it!”
The three young people grinned at one another. Since Don had come to Belvedere that first night, a friendship had developed among them. They had been out to dinner together in Washington a number of times, often joined by Don’s fiancée, Loretta. The meetings had ostensibly been to discuss the urban renewal plan, now enmeshed in a legal wrangle, but the pretext of business soon vanished. They were the same age, and they had much in common; they were part of the generation that saw itself as the vanguard of a bright new age. The prejudices and taboos of their parents, they believed, had no hold on them. The old division of race hardly mattered.
“Hey,” Jay said to Don, “this would be a great place to shoot your book-jacket picture. With the monument in the background.”
“OK. But how should I look? I don’t want to be grinning like an idiot.”
He had told them, the night before, that Doubleday, through his literary agent, had offered him a book contract, with an advance of four thousand dollars.
“Four thousand dollars!” Mary had said with a gasp. “Don, you’re rich!”
“What are you going to call it?” Jay asked.
“I’m not sure. I’m trying to think of a title that doesn’t sound too pretentious. It’s about growing up colored in D.C.”
“Something classy,” Mary said, “like Baldwin. He has great titles.”
“But not so grand. I mean, this is really a small, personal book; it’s not in the same league as Baldwin’s essays.”
Mary shook her head in disagreement; he had given her several chapters to read. “It’s different, but I think a lot of people will be able to relate to it. I mean, we were all kids, and we had dogs and went to movies and thought about weird things. I think your book will help a lot of white people realize that you aren’t different than they are, that people are all alike, they’re just people.”
“That’s not exactly, The Fire Next Time,” he said ruefully.
“That’s the sequel,” she said with a smile.
Now Jay had Don move so that he could take a portrait photo with the monument and the crowds behind him.
“Just relax and look right at the camera. No, too serious; you look like you have a toothache. That’s it, relax. Good. I’ll do a whole roll, and you can pick the one you want.”
“Oh, my God!” Mary said. “Look, it’s James Garner, and he’s walking with Diahann Carroll.”
“There’s Harry Belafonte!” Jay aimed his camera in their direction. “And Charlton Heston. Oh shit, it’s Brando. It’s actually Brando.”
“Show him a movie star, and he forgets all about great literature.” Don sighed.
“My boss is going to love these,” Jay said, still shooting. “Real movie stars, only forty-seven and a half miles from Belvedere.”
Finally, the huge throng began to lumber off down the broad lanes of Constitution Avenue, towards the Lincoln Memorial, as Peter, Paul and Mary sang one of Bob Dylan’s new songs, telling an older generation that their sons and their daughters were no longer theirs to command.
She and Don walked along as close as they could get to the leaders of the march, as Jay darted back and forth shooting pictures. Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph and other famous names in Negro America linked arms as they walked up the avenue, the sunlight filtering down through the thick mesh of trees overhead, dappling their faces and their bodies. The huge river of people moved on and on, under the arch of trees. It seemed to Mary that every spot in Washington was blanketed by a carpet of humanity, singing, smiling, calling out. It seemed to her as if a sea of love swept down the broad boulevard, wrapping Negro and white together in its embrace. She felt a lump rise in her throat.
“Oh, Don,” she said, grasping his arm, “this is what America is all about! It isn’t all words, this is it, it couldn’t happen anywhere else. Nothing will ever be the same, not after today!”
He turned to look back down the avenue, where the crowd stretched as far as he could see, and he, too, was caught up in the emotion of it all. “I never thought I’d see anything like this. Not in my hometown. Not ever! My God, look at them all!”
By the time they arrived at the Lincoln Memorial, the crowd stretched around all four sides of the Reflecting Pool and far beyond. Roy Wilkins stepped to the microphone and announced that, halfway across the world, in Ghana, W. E. B. Du Bois had died that very morning. The father figure of the Negro intelligentsia and the NAACP had soured on America and turned to communism as the hope of the world, but Wilkins said nothing of that. “At the dawn of the twentieth century,” he said, “his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.”
Under the platform, away from the public view, heated arguments were taking place about the speeches. John Lewis of SNCC was about to give a speech harshly critical of the government, belittling the civil rights bill. Lewis and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins shook their fingers in each other’s faces as they argued about the speech. A truce committee that included Dr. King, a white minister and A. Philip Randolph retired to a guard booth under Lincoln’s giant knee. A compromise draft was hastily produced on a borrowed typewriter.
But to the people in the crowd, no such emotions were apparent. There were speeches and songs, stretched out to fill the hours of the long afternoon, and the good humor of the marchers did not abate, even as they mopped their brows in the August heat. The day was beginning to wane by the time Martin Luther King walked to the platform, standing before the cream-colored knees of
Lincoln, where, years before, the great Negro singer Martin Anderson had sung when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her their hall because of her race.
Mary’s feet were aching. She had been standing and walking all day. She slipped off her shoes and plunged her feet into the cool water of the Reflecting Pool, and Jay saw her and snapped a photograph. Dr. King began to speak in his rolling preacher’s voice. He had labored long over his text, but on that spot, in front of that huge throng, he began to soar away from the text. Behind him the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!”
And he did.
“I have a dream,” he said and he repeated the phrase, mingling it with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” again and again, words of hope and optimism and joy, his voice ringing out over the huge, hushed crowd. Mary sat very still, thinking that she had never before been held in such thrall by a speaker; she looked to her right and her left, and no one was moving. The words gripped the huge crowd like a giant claw; it had no will to do anything but listen. The speaker told them of a day when “all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
Later, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, John Kennedy, who knew a helluva speech when he heard one, would greet the preacher with an outstretched hand and the very same words, “I have a dream.”
Mary, Jay and Don walked slowly back in search of the Belvedere bus, wading through the incredible pile of debris left by the largest crowd that had ever come to the city. They were quiet, each overwhelmed by the emotions of the day. Never before, as Mary had said, had the dream of America seemed so real. They felt they could reach out and touch it with the soft pink haze of the ending summer day. It was one of those days, they knew, that comes once in a generation, the kind you tell your grandchildren about. I was there, standing in front of Lincoln, on the day that three hundred thousand people marched and Martin Luther King called out, “I have a dream.” How lucky they were, to be young, in this time, when John F. Kennedy challenged them to bear every burden and Martin Luther King led the March on Washington. It proved that everything was possible, that tomorrow glittered with hope and dreams. Other generations might find disillusionment and failure, not theirs.
It was 1963, and they owned the future.
Journal: Donald A. Johnson
One of the students wrote an essay about being in the Army, and we discussed it in class today. I said that I didn’t think I would go and fight for the United States of America, not now, not today, if another “police action” like Korea broke out in the Mideast or in Vietnam, where we have some troops. They were fairly shocked by that. I said I didn’t think I would spill my blood for the Stars and Stripes, even though I spent my childhood lusting to do just that.
I used to be pissed, in fact, that I missed World War II. It started when I was three, so nobody could accuse me of shirking. Three-year-olds do not make great infantrymen; changing their diapers interferes with combat readiness.
It seems that for as long as I remember, I have been going to war movies. When I was a kid, I always came home convinced that war was the greatest game of them all, better even than Lash LaRue or Finding the Holy Grail. I saw Spencer Tracy spend thirty seconds over Tokyo and John Wayne take Iwo Jima and Alan Ladd outwit the Jerries behind enemy lines in France.
Our neighborhood was an easy place to turn into a war zone. Mr. Williams’s neat woodpile was a perfect B-2,9.1 flew it regularly over Tokyo with Thunder as my bombardier. I barked orders at him, and he just looked back at me with his stupid stare. How they let him into the Army Air Corps I’ll never know. Mr. Williams used to peer out the window at me, wondering what I was doing. He would say to his wife, “What on earth is that Johnson boy doing in my woodpile all the time, with that dog of his? That is the strangest colored boy I have ever seen, I swear it is.”
Sometimes I was John Wayne, capturing Japs. I made Darlene be a Jap, and I tied her hands behind her and marched her up and down the alley behind our house and called her “Dirty Jap.” Sometimes she thought it was fun, but when she got tired of it and I made her keep marching, she’d escape and run in the house to my mother, crying, and my mother would order me not to make Darlene a Jap anymore. So I made her a Nazi, which was, after all, following the letter of my mother’s command.
(I have this terrible fear that I have warped Darlene forever, that on her wedding night she will ask her new husband to tie her up and whisper “Dirty Jap” in her ear and he will wonder how come he got the colored girl with the weirdest sexual fantasies in all of America.)
It never occurred to me that the Japs I saw in the comic strips — little yellow men with buck teeth — were the same kind of racial stereotype as the shuffling, grinning Negro. I absolutely believed that Japan was crammed with buck-toothed little yellow people who liked nothing better than to while away an afternoon by torturing American pilots. I knew I would be very brave if they tortured me. I’d laugh in the face of the little yellow Jap who tried to make me talk. Once I made Darlene tie me up and pretend to be a Jap general. When I told her she could hit me, her eyes lit up, and she gave me a real whack. Thunder growled at her, the only loyal thing he ever did. Darlene got mad at Thunder and whacked him too, and he howled and ran under the porch. Neither of us wanted to play that game again. But I made Darlene and Thunder play Bataan Death March, in which I made them tramp all over the neighborhood while I yelled at them and prodded them with the butt of my toy rifle. I yelled “American Dogs!” at them in my best Japanese accent, which was not an insult to Thunder, I guess. Darlene got bored with this pretty fast and wanted to go play with her dolls. I told her I would bayonet her and her dollies if she tried to get away. She ran howling to my mother, who called me into the house.
“Did you tell this child you were going to stick her with a bayonet?”
“She was on the Bataan Death March. That’s what happens.”
“What Death March?”
“Everybody knows about the Bataan Death March.”
“You just march yourself right up to your room, Mr. Donald Abednego Johnson, and stay there until I say so.” When she used my full name, I knew I was in deep shit.
Most of all, though, I used to play Dying in Combat. It was the best way to die, very dramatic. You got shot, and you gave a grunt, and you fell to the ground, and everything got very quiet and violins played in the background. Your best buddy cradled your head in his arms, and you gave a brave smile, and you said something like, “Every time you see the flag waving in the breeze, think of me. Every time there’s a home run at Yankee Stadium, or a sunset, or a Fourth of July parade, I’ll be there, buddy. Now go out there and give ‘em hell!”
And you’d close your eyes and die, and the music would play real loud. Sometimes, at the end of the movie, they’d show the guys who died, marching off into the clouds with cocky grins thrown over their shoulders, carrying full battle gear as they headed to the Pearly Gates, clouds swirling about their ankles. Death was only a minor inconvenience before you marched off into soldier heaven with all your buddies.
I used to practice dying, a lot. I’d clutch my stomach, and I’d roll over two or three times, and I’d make my speech, looking up at the sky. Sometimes Thunder would come over and stand on my face, which ruined the dramatic effect. I’d shove him away, and he’d just stare at me. It is sort of hard to make a stirring death speech when staring into the snout of a stupid dog. Especially when he drooled on my chin, which Alan Ladd never had to put up with.
In the movies, all the American soldiers were whites, but sometimes there were newsreels of the Negro divisions that were fighting overseas. Everybody in my neighborhood was especially proud that Negroes were fighting, and shedding their blood the same as white Americans. When men fought and died for the same cause, surely t
hey’d see that we were Americans too. After the war, when President Truman desegregated the armed forces, and then Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, we thought everything was going to be different. But Jim Crow was as strong as ever.
I tried to explain to my white classmates why I didn’t want to go and fight now, for a country that was still keeping my people at the back of the bus. Why should I want to go out and shoot people who had never lynched a Negro or killed a Negro child or passed any laws that kept Negroes as second-class human beings. I would die in Alabama or Mississippi if I had to, but not in some foreign war. I am an American, but I believe we have to fix what’s wrong in our own country before we can police the world. My father says I shouldn’t say such things, because white people will think we are afraid to fight. If all the graves with the little white crosses on them from World War II didn’t convince them, then they will never be convinced. I’m tired of caring about what white people think. When Jim Crow is finally buried, when Kennedy’s civil rights bill is passed, then I’ll enlist. I’ll be the first one in line. And if they shoot me in some foreign land, while I gasp out my last breath as I stare up at the sky, at least I won’t have some stupid dog drooling on my chin.
“Have I found a sweet piece of ass,” Roger said. “She’s coming over later. Eat your hearts out.”
“There goes my night’s sleep.” Jay groaned.
“I hope this broad is quiet,” Sam said.
Sam and Jay were sitting at the kitchen table having a beer.
“You guys sure are in a crappy mood tonight. Pissed because you’re not getting any.”
“Sure, Rog. We’re not great lovers, like you.”
“I take that back. Jay’s been dipping his wick lately. They say the married ones are the horniest. Can’t get enough.”
