by Caryl Rivers
“Are you ready?” Don asked.
The minister nodded. He motioned, and Rabbi Gwertzman, James Washington, Father Heath and Reverend Smilie stepped out of the line and joined him.
“Is this the delegation?” Mary asked.
“Yes,” the minister said.
“You’re going to demand to see the mayor?”
“Yes, it’s our right to see him.”
The four men started up the steps of City Hall together, followed by reporters and the NBC crew.
“Nigger lovers!” came a shout, again, and another murmur ran through the crowd, this one, Mary thought, angrier than the last.
As the men approached the door, a policeman stepped in front of them.
“May we pass please, Officer?” Rabbi Gwertzman said.
“The mayor can’t see you.”
“This is a public building. Surely you do not intend to keep us out,” Father Heath said.
“Wait a minute.” The policeman grunted. He went into the building and reappeared, accompanied by a corpulent, morose man in a wrinkled brown suit.
Sam, standing next to Mary, groaned. “They’ve sent the asshole.”
Dave Fardin, administrative assistant to Mayor Swarman, used his bulk for passive aggression. He was the ideal buffer between the mayor and the citizenry. Pleas, demands, complaints and insults fell against the flesh of Dave Fardin and they were ingested, as if by some carnivorous Jell-O, and never heard from again.
“Mr. Fardin, we must see the mayor,” Reverend Johnson said.
“He’s in conference.”
“We will wait.”
“He’s going to be in conference all day.”
“Who’s he in conference with?” Mary asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“If I quote you on that, you are going to look really dumb, Dave.”
“I’ll find out,” he said.
“Didn’t the mayor know these people were coming?” asked the AP reporter.
“The mayor doesn’t meet with anybody unless they have an appointment.”
“We have been calling his office continually to inform him we were coming,” Rabbi Gwertzman said. “We were assured he had received the messages.”
Fardin was silent, his most effective technique.
“We are not leaving until we have a personal meeting with the mayor, and get assurances from him about the urban renewal plan,” said Reverend Johnson.
Fardin said nothing.
The four members of the delegation turned and walked back down to the sidewalk.
Sam said to Mary, “Oh, that asshole Swarman. Now the shit is going to hit the fan.”
The delegation walked up to Don.
“We’re not leaving,” James said.
“That’s right,” Don said. “Are your people ready?”
James nodded, his face grim and set hard.
Don held up his hand, and six of the marchers, all students trained in nonviolent protest, walked out and sat down in the street. Six others followed them.
“Christ, the niggers are sitting in the fucking street,” came a cry. The students began to sing, drowning out the cries from the crowd.
Just like a rock standing in the water, we shall not be moved.
Another line of marchers went out and sat down. Don said to the four members of the delegation, “You’ll be the last, OK?”
Police Chief Grimes walked up to the Reverend Johnson.
“These people are illegally blocking a city street. If they don’t get up, we’ll have to arrest them.”
“I understand,” the minister said. “If you tell the mayor to meet with us, our people will get up.”
“I can’t tell the mayor what to do.”
“I strongly urge you to advise him then,” said Rabbi Gwertzman. “If this situation gets out of hand, he’s going to be blamed.”
The crowd was getting noisier. Grimes looked out at it apprehensively. All the marchers were now gathered in front of City Hall, and the crowd jammed all the side streets leading up to it. If there were a disturbance, people would undoubtedly be killed or injured.
“If those people aren’t off the streets in five minutes, I will have no choice but to arrest them,” Grimes said, and walked away.
There were more shouts from the crowd, vying with the singing of the marchers for dominance. People were pressing closer to get a better view, and some of the city policemen had linked arms at the edge of the sidewalk to keep people from spilling over into the street. The whole area in front of City Hall had become a caldron of sound. Jay, who had been absorbed in photographing the scene, came up to Mary and said, “If the crowd surges, get up to the front door and through it, quick. People could get trampled here.”
We shall overcome, someday
Kill the niggers
Back to Africa
Oh, deep in my heart…
Suddenly, the wail of a siren split the air, and Mary looked around and saw that the police van was moving down the street. It pulled up in front of the building, near where the students were sitting, and a dozen uniformed officers jumped out. They walked over to one student, and two policemen put their arms under his shoulders. He did not resist but went limp in their grasp. They carried him to the wagon. There were cheers and boos from the crowd. Officers picked up each student in turn, carrying him or her off to the wagon as the din continued. When the students were all in the van, the driver turned it around slowly and drove off in the direction of the police station.
Mary looked at Don. He had been watching all this calmly, showing no emotion. She admired his coolness. Her own hands, she discovered, were shaking. The noise did not abate. The whole scene seemed something out of a madman’s fantasy. People in the crowd were screaming, but at least they seemed to be getting their energy out that way. So far, things had not gotten out of control, but they were on edge, she knew. She looked at Don again; if he was worried at all, he did not show it. He was looking around, sizing up the situation. Then he lifted his hand, and another marshal nodded. Fifteen more students went out and sat on the street, arms linked together.
Sam, standing close to Mary, had to yell to make himself heard by the police chief.
“Where are you going to put them all, in the kindergarten gym?”
Grimes shook his head, gave an angry glance at the second-story window in City Hall. Then he headed off towards the front door.
“Swarman better get the fuck out here, or he’s going to have a riot on his hands,” Sam said.
“Maybe Grimes can talk some sense into him.”
In a few minutes the siren sounded again, and the van returned, backed up by another one. The policemen moved in again. They moved to the side of a young white girl who was sitting with her arms linked to a black student. They jerked her arms away, roughly, lifted the girl and half-dragged her to the wagon.
“Oh, you’re hurting me!” she yelled, and one of the SANE members screamed out, “Cossack!”
This set the crowd off again, and the noise level intensified. Once again, the wagon was filled with marchers, and the van turned away and drove off. When it had gone, Don raised his hand again, and more people walked out to sit in the street. The howl of the crowd was frenzied. The policemen were being moved, by inches, into the street. Some of the people were angry, some curious, some, now, trying unsuccessfully to get out.
Mary’s eye caught Father Heath, standing on the sidewalk, swaying back and forth. Then he walked out, very deliberately, and sat down in the street.
Sam, next to Mary, half-yelled in her ear, “Gwertzman’s next. He can’t stand being outdone by the Catholics.”
The rabbi walked out and sat next to the priest.
“He was a pompous son of a bitch before. Now he’ll be impossible. A fucking hero of the civil rights movement.”
“Sam, the line. It’s giving!” Mary yelled.
One policeman fell to his k
nees as the line was breached and the wall of people poured into the street. Two young men — one of them the boy in the motorcycle jacket — charged the sitting students. He raised his fist to strike one of the Negroes, but a marshal, the size of a football tackle, stepped in front of him and absorbed the blow. Two policemen grabbed the young man and dragged him off. The policeman who had been standing by City Hall moved quickly across the street to try to force the crowd back. Mary held her breath. She thought the policemen might be simply swept away by the mass of humanity. But the line held this time, and they were able to force the crowd back a few inches. A woman fell and would have been trampled except for another woman and a man who dragged her to her feet. The noise was so intense that Mary could feel her temples throbbing.
Then the door of City Hall opened, and Chief Grimes walked out. He went up to Don, the two spoke briefly and Don nodded to him. The officer turned around and went towards the building again, and Don raised both hands in the air. The singing stopped, and the noises of the crowd quieted somewhat. All eyes were on the slender young black man with his hands in the air.
“The mayor will see us,” he shouted.
A cry of triumph went up from the marchers, and another chorus of boos and catcalls and cheers from the crowd.
“And we will tell him that we will be back tomorrow and the next day and the next, until justice is done!”
The people sitting in the streets got up, and the marchers burst into a spontaneous chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” There were more cries from the crowd, but Mary sensed that the flash point was past. Many people were already starting to leave, frightened by the realization of how dangerous the situation had become. The police line was holding.
Mary caught Don’s eye then, and he flashed her a broad grin and the old Churchill V for victory sign. She grinned back at him and waved, and then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a movement.
She turned. The man in the Army jacket was beside her, and as the arm flashed out from under the jacket, she saw the gun. She lunged for it but was not fast enough; the explosion rocked through the street. She felt herself pushed aside as four policemen grabbed the gun at once and wrestled the man to the ground.
She looked up and saw Don fall; the grin was still on his face as the impact of the bullet hit him, whirled him around. She never knew, afterwards, how much of the scene she remembered from actually seeing it and how much came from the photograph Jay took, freezing the moment into an image that would run on the front pages of most of the newspapers in the country the next day. He had thought he was shooting Don’s victory sign, but it turned out to be something else.
A chorus of screams and cries echoed down the street.
“No, God, please, no!” she cried as she ran over to him. He was lying, face up, on the street. Loretta was kneeling next to him, sobbing, “Donnie, Donnie!” and his uncle was kneeling too, ripping open his shirt and trying to staunch the blood pouring from a gaping hole in his chest.
“Doctor, we need a doctor!” Mary called out, trying to make herself heard above the noise, and a man from the crowd elbowed his way through, knelt down and pressed his hand against Don’s chest to cut off the flow of blood from the artery. Some of the students had crouched down behind cars, not sure whether more shots would be fired; others, understanding what had happened, were weeping. Policemen were pushing back a crowd of curious onlookers.
The expression on Don’s face was one, still, of puzzlement. He looked around, as if he was trying to sort out what the commotion was all about. He looked right at her, then, and she saw comprehension forming in his eyes.
“Hang on,” she said. “Oh, Don, hang on! The ambulance is on its way. You’re going to be all right.”
He shook his head slightly.
“Not,” he said, “not the South.”
And then his eyes rolled out of focus, and he died.
He stood, silently, in the gathering of the October day, looking at the simple headstone with only one word, KENNEDY, on it.
His second son had lived barely three days, his tiny body overwhelmed by an infection that its undeveloped lungs could not surmount. He had paced restlessly in the hospital corridor near the spot where his son fought for life in an oxygen chamber. As he paced he noticed, in one of the small cubicles, a child who had been severely burned. He borrowed a slip of paper to write a note of encouragement to the child’s mother. As he wrote, he was not the head of state, just a heartsick father. A child’s illness makes all parents equals.
Two hours later his son died, and he went upstairs to the room in which he had been sleeping, and he cried, alone.
The family’s old friend Cardinal Cushing said the funeral mass. But when it was over, the father lingered, touching the tiny casket as if he could not bear to leave it alone. None of his friends had ever seen him so distraught. The cardinal had to tug at him to get him to leave. “Come on, Jack, let’s go. God is good.”
After that, he and his wife had clung together, even, sometimes, in public, something they had never been known to do.
But on this October day he stood alone by the grave of his son, murmuring, ‘He seems so alone here, ‘ thinking that his family had known too much of death. Of four children born to him and his wife, only two survived. His sister lay forever still under British soil, and whatever traces of his brother remained were someplace in earth or water. Nothing had been found after his plane exploded in the air. He thought of the poem his wife had memorized for him, early in their marriage, after he had told her it was his favorite:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade…
When spring brings back blue days, and fair…
But that was in the days when he was still obsessed with death. Now he had too much to live for to be enchanted by dark romanticism. He had a daughter and a son, still alive, who needed him. There should be no more children, he thought. He could not bear to lose another, and his wife was not robust. Two were alive, and that was enough. His mother had borne nine children, and then announced to her husband that he would come no more to her bed. Their marriage settled into sexless companionship, because she would not violate the church’s ban on birth control. He thought such behavior odd and antiquated. He had even told a friend that he thought abortion was sometimes a rational solution to an unwanted pregnancy. The old pieties had no claim on him.
With children — unlike with adults — the detachment that so marked him vanished. He loved the way his daughter nestled into his arms, the sweet smell of her hair as he read to her from a storybook. He loved the way she giggled, on the boat, when he told her about the white whale who ate men’s socks. Many a dignitary and aide had lost his socks overboard to the whale. His son, who hated to be still, delighted him when he raced about his office, poking his head into the crannies of his desk. Children touched something in him that adults never could. So long the second son, he had become the father, tending to the crippled old man and seeing his own children starting to grow tall.
He had never really thought much about middle age; he had been young so long. Only lately was he discovering that he rather liked it, now that he was there. There was an age when tousled, feckless youth was no longer becoming, but rather sad and out of place. He was even starting to like his new, mature face.
He had been self-absorbed for a long time, creating himself. He’d had to be, it was how he survived. His children took him out of that. He would watch his children learning and testing the world around them, but he would not, as his father had done, try to control their destinies.
He had worn the colors, fulfilled the dream. He did not regret it — though he wondered, sometimes, how it would have gone with him if he had not.
His children would not have its burden. They were Americans, with nothing to prove, and their lives belonged only to them.
Jay was packing his trunk when the phone rang. He went into I the kitchen and picked up the receiver. I
t was the UPI bureau chief, congratulating him. His photograph had run in more papers than any other photo that year, except for the picture of Katzenbach and Wallace. A good candidate for the Pulitzer Prize, he said.
Jay thanked him and hung up the phone. The Pulitzer Prize. That was what Charlie had said three nights ago, and he had recoiled at the words, his heart constricting inside him. Oh no, not for that.
He hated the picture; he wished he never had to look at it again. It was so much like Capa’s famous photo of the Spanish soldier, taken at the point of the bullet’s impact, head thrown back, body reeling with the fatal blow, and on Don Johnson’s face — shock, surprise, wonder — he did not yet understand what had happened to him.
“Oh, damn,” Jay said. He pounded his fist against the cabinet. “Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn!”
Did Capa know the Spanish soldier? Or was he simply an abstraction of death? Don Johnson was no abstraction. Usually when Jay printed a picture after he knew he had captured something dramatic but didn’t know quite what, there was a delicious sense of anticipation. But when he had printed the picture of Don, the pain in his gut was so intense he thought he would double up with it. As the image materialized on the paper, it brought back the moment with its terrible certainty. He had known that Don was dead an instant after he pushed the shutter. He had no idea how he knew it, but he did.
It was when he walked upstairs with the print that Charlie had said, “Pulitzer Prize.” The words had hit him like a blow. The revulsion must have been plain on his face, because it was the first time he had seen Charlie rattled. Charlie took a step backwards, looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, Jay.”
Much later on that terrible day he had held Mary in his arms as she wept. She had written the story dry-eyed, holding her grief in check. He had cried too, unashamedly, the first time since he was a child he had let anyone see him cry. She said, over and over again, “Why? Why? Why did they have to kill him?” and he had no answer for that.
