Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  The sign suddenly appears as we turn the corner: Lorraine Motel. It is at the end of the street, high above the other rooftops. When the sun is finished setting, it will glow and flash its red neon arrow to attract drivers to this desolate corner of Memphis. The diverse typefaces in the sign allude to the world of a half century ago just like the light green of the metal poles that support it, the same color of the doors, a color from that time, the color of a faded modernity. What I have seen so many times in photographs and documentaries is now in front of me. As soon as we get to the end of the street I’ll set foot in the place where I have lived in my imagination for the past few months. A few more steps and it will be like crossing a veil and entering the space and time of an old film, the interior of the unfinished book I left on hold in order to come here.

  * * *

  The Lorraine Motel is lower and longer and much less imposing than I expected. In the building annexed to it, a modern construction, the doors to the National Civil Rights Museum have already closed. I recognize the two rows of rooms, with their wide windows and doors facing the running railing. It was the rationalist architecture of back then; simple, open forms and light colors, in contrast to the dark brick of the rest of the neighborhood, with the soot of factories and coal locomotives. The Lorraine Motel could have been in Florida, in California, facing the ocean, with a background of palm trees. The courtyard in front of the parking lot was a pool fifty years ago. Room 306, toward the center, on the second floor, is distinguished by a wreath of white and red flowers hanging from the railing at the exact location where Martin Luther King was leaning when the shot was fired. Below the room two cars are parked, two models from the sixties, like the ones we see in the photos from that day, one of them is a long, white Cadillac with rear wings, identical to the one that the owner of a funeral home in Memphis made available for King when he was in town.

  * * *

  The museum has been closed for over an hour. It’s just past seven in the evening, a day at the end of May. The light of this hour is the same as that of 6:00 p.m. in early April. Apart from two other visitors, who have wandered around taking photos and are now checking the museum hours before leaving, we’re the only people in the forecourt of the Lorraine Motel, and the neighborhood it seems.

  There’s a profound stillness in this warm and humid afternoon. On April 4, 1968, the air would have been cooler and more transparent, due to the storm of the prior day. If I turn my back to the motel, I face the building where Bessie Brewer’s boardinghouse used to be. It stands there, backlit, above a garden that was a garbage dump half a century ago. Now I can’t distinguish the window where the barrel of that rifle stuck out that day at 6:00 p.m.

  The distance between those back windows and the balconies of the Lorraine Motel is also smaller than I had imagined. If I hadn’t come here, I would not have known that Martin Luther King’s room was facing west. In just a few minutes there would not be enough light to make the shot from that distance. The most defining moments almost did not happen. We go up to South Main. I recognize the topography as if I had walked these streets in dreams, with a mixture of certainty and unreality. The corner, where the museum gift shop is now located, used to be Canipe Amusement Company. Here is the recessed entrance, between the store window and the corner, where he dropped the bag with the blanket and the rifle, and continued walking south toward the white Mustang, parked by the brick building that is still the firehouse.

  Some things change and some do not. Jim’s Grill does not exist anymore, but the facade is the same. Number 422. He crossed that doorstep and went up a stairway that perhaps is still there, with the word ROOMS painted on every step.

  I recognize everything and yet nothing is exactly how I had imagined. Beyond the firehouse the street turns east and descends down a long hill to the train station and the road that leads to the state border. The landscape widens as you exit Memphis, the street becomes more open. It must have been a relief to see the city retract in the rearview mirror as the police sirens grew weaker, to step on the gas and feel that mixture of panic and incredulity at having accomplished the plan with only one shot and now be driving in silence through the countryside, moments before turning on the radio and hearing confirmation of the death and the sign that the hunt had begun.

  * * *

  The next morning the museum is open but the past seems to have receded, as the sea on a beach with a low tide. The esplanade in front of the Lorraine Motel is crowded with groups of tourists and students. People smile and pose for photos with Room 306 and the crown of white and red flowers in the background.

  The museum was designed to give visitors an immediate and tactile impression of the past. In this space the past becomes practicable; it exists in the three dimensions of the present. You can read about the segregated buses of the South, but you can also get inside of one identical to where Rosa Parks once sat. You can touch the chrome surfaces, smell the plastic of back then, see the ads from 1954 lining the inside of the bus, above the windows. There’s a sitting figure and she’s a mannequin and a ghost, a woman with a hat and a coat and an air of righteousness and dignity.

  The more effective the appearance of proximity, the more grave the inevitable lie. In a room with low lights, we see a burnt bus. This was one of the buses that carried Freedom Riders in May 1961, into some of the most racist cities of the South. Young women and men, black and white, committed to the mysterious heroism of doing ordinary and already legal things that could nevertheless cost them their lives, and not respond when violence rained upon them.

  They arrived at stations where mobs of angry white men would be waiting with sticks, stones, and pipes. In pictures and in TV images on the monitors of the museum, we see those faces twisted by anger, by the intoxication of collective brutality and impunity, young faces for the most part, sometimes very young, almost all male, men with white shirts or overalls, surrounding a bus, breaking windows, trying to overturn it, retreating only when it’s in flames, fierce and triumphant, exalted by revenge, by the fire that will burn alive all the people inside if they don’t manage to get out.

  I can touch the ribbed silver surface of the bus and I can step inside. I see the beautiful drawing of the greyhound that gives the company its name and the jubilant sign written along the side in blue letters against a white background: IT’S SUCH A COMFORT TO TRAVEL BY BUS. But who could experience the terror of arriving in Montgomery or Birmingham and see the innocuous spectacle of everyday life—the shops, the gas stations, the people on the sidewalks—and know that in a few minutes a mob will surround you, spit on you, beat you, perhaps even kill you, and not because you lifted a fist in protest or demanded equality or justice. No, they hate you because you dared to do what everyone else does: buy a soda and a sandwich at the lunch counter at the station, sit to read the newspaper in a waiting room without paying attention to the WHITES ONLY sign or the looks of the people around you.

  * * *

  The past can be visited at the museum not only to investigate what happened but to anoint oneself with its powerful alloy of heroism and suffering, unprecedented brutality and admirable rebellion. Fear, poverty, pain, are transmuted into martyrdom. The bursting abscess of hatred can no longer reach you. Black Americans with nothing but their dignity face water jets and police batons. The water jets are so strong they tear the bark of trees and send full-grown adults flying against the walls like rags.

  The bodies of lynched men, with white shirts and broken necks, hang from trees in the South like burial mounds. Wooden churches burn in the night. On the silent video monitor, a group of young Freedom Riders—the women in dresses, the men in suits and ties—walks between two rows of thugs who spit at them, kick them, and push them. A white woman with a baby in her arms is seen opening her mouth widely. They will never forget what these mothers would yell: Kill them niggers! Kill ’em all! The intensity of the injury, the vehemence of hate and its mix of vulgarity and ignorance, cannot be translated.

 
Wiry black men march between lines of soldiers with rifles and bayonets, each carrying a sign with a single repeated phrase of words and letters that multiply silently into a unanimous affirmation, I AM A MAN I AM A MAN I AM A MAN.

  In an exact replica of a lunch counter in the fifties, there are stools occupied by mannequins of men and women who dared challenge segregation, and empty stools for visitors to sit and join them and look at the menu and the sign over the bar that says WHITES ONLY.

  Experience, both the verb and the noun, are inadequate terms. People in marketing like them so much they never stop repeating them. But that experience is largely a usurpation. You will get to sit on a metal stool and for a moment feel like you are in a segregated lunch counter in Birmingham, for instance, in 1961. But no one is going to come and pour the ketchup or a hot coffee on your head, or grab you by the shirt and try to break your jaw against the counter; there will be no fingernails trying to scratch your face and your eyeballs like a bird of prey.

  The police officers will keep their distance, watching with indifference, waiting for the mob to satisfy their rage. After staring at the hate-filled faces of those white men, I realize the physical resemblance: Galt, Sneyd, Lowmeyr, Ray. He looks so much like them he could easily blend in; in fact, he could even pass for one of the police officers who watch and do nothing.

  * * *

  The museum is designed as a journey through time, an exemplary history that moves from darkness to light, from injustice to the full measure of citizenship, from the slave ships to the present, where at last we see what less than a half century ago would have seemed unheard-of in this country: black and white and brown children coming out of the same buses, obeying with difficulty their teacher who tells them to keep it low, using touch screens with ease and impatience, taking selfies with their phones.

  The past is a theme park. You can pose next to the life-size figures that cover the wall as if you had been in one of those marches, walking right next to Martin Luther King. You can enter the cell where King was held in Birmingham, Alabama, sit on a bed identical to his, and read, projected on the wall, the letter that he wrote on loose sheets, in the margins of a newspaper, under the light that seeped through the bars, a light as weak in the darkness as the oil lamps that illuminated the prophets in their cells.

  But who could know how that darkness felt, the sound of the bolts and the cries of the prisoners, who could know the insidious doubt in the middle of the night, the suspicion that all this sacrifice is in vain and that he has brought even more suffering to others, the thirst of the soul, the secret cowardice.

  Who can imagine the fear of the approaching steps and the clacking sound of the batons on the metal bars announcing an imminent beating: the fear of the person who is locked in darkness and knows that the guards can beat him to a pulp, torture him, break his every bone, and nothing will happen to them, no consequences, not even a sanction. A group of children play, going in and out of the cell, putting their hands through the bars in a gesture of supplication. They snap photos of one another, their faces pressed against the metal, laughing.

  * * *

  The itinerary is an exemplary story and also a pilgrimage. Martin Luther King speaks in 1963 before a crowd of tens of thousands stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument; in 1965 he leads the march from Selma to Montgomery; in March 1968, he advances, with a visible expression of vulnerability and anguish, in a protest march by striking Memphis sanitation workers, when police are already attacking and part of the march has turned into a riot.

  The images from the speech on the night of April 3 in Memphis are in color. They are projected in a dark room that feels like a chapel, on a screen that is suspended from the ceiling in front of a few benches. The audience must look up in order to see them, like a crucifix on an altar. King’s eyes are piercing. His face shines with perspiration and the skin around his temples and jaw tightens as he speaks.

  We don’t forget, not even for a second, that this man will never speak in public again and will die in less than twenty-four hours. The same voice and that same spoken music have been repeated in echoes multiplied through the rooms of the museum, a statement of condemnation and prophecy. After some metallic stairs and corridors with walls covered in photos, we come out to a space illuminated by the light of day. The last stop in the pilgrimage is a motel room.

  The light of the present illuminates the last space of the past, preserved like a mausoleum, behind a glass wall. Beyond the windows of the Lorraine Motel is the pale blue sky over the city of Memphis.

  Behind the glass wall, Room 306 is frozen in the evening of April 4, 1968. There are two beds. One of them is partially undone and there’s an open newspaper on it. The bathroom door is open. On a low table there’s a pack of cigarettes and a full ashtray. From the interior of the room the shot would have sounded like a firecracker. Perhaps one could have also heard the body thrown against the door by the bullet.

  * * *

  I see the bullet moments later. I’ve come out of an elevator and find myself in what used to be Bessie Brewer’s boardinghouse. It takes a few moments for this to sink in. Just a few minutes before, we were in the museum. Now we see that history from the angle of a more somber and less visited room, a place beyond the reach of any spirit of celebration for the legacy of the civil rights movement. Here’s where he hid, at the end of this dark hallway.

  I see the bullet that pierced through the jaw and the spine of Martin Luther King: a deformed metal flower tucked in cotton inside one of the round little boxes the FBI used to collect evidence. I also see the rifle that fired it. It is smaller than I imagined and, without doubt, lighter than the one I had to carry during military service. There’s the wooden stock and a scope, and the binoculars he bought for forty dollars.

  I peek into room 5B and see the flimsy bed with the curved iron headboard and a green blanket, the dirty sofa, and the dusty Christmas ornaments on the mantelpiece. There is a dresser with a murky mirror that he moved in order to have a clear view of the window.

  I see the shared bathroom at the end of the hall. The bathtub still stands against the left wall in the corner below the window, but the dirty footprints of where he stood, trying to keep his balance as he aimed, are no longer there. A glass wall prevents me from entering the bathroom and looking out that window, but there’s a window in the next room with an almost identical view. It’s hard to believe how close it is to the motel.

  I can see the horizontal silhouette of the Lorraine Motel, the railing along the rooms with their green doors, and the crown of white and red flowers. Beyond the rooftop is the dark green of a thick forest and the light blue of the sky. It’s the same landscape from the black-and-white photos that were taken then, but down below, instead of heaps of garbage, we see a garden with young trees. A gardener in overalls is cutting the grass and a powerful smell of sap enters through the open window.

  * * *

  It is then that I discover something unexpected: a vertical showcase in the center of a room, where all the objects I have read about and seen in photographs are on display. I have imagined them with such precision, it’s hard to believe I’m now seeing them in real life. It’s like staring at the barber’s basin in Don Quixote, the vial of poison that Emma Bovary drank, the glasses and bandages of Wells’s Invisible Man. I see the suitcase and everything else I’ve read in the typewritten lists of the FBI: the small shampoo bottle, the comb, the Schlitz beer cans, the quilt where the rifle was wrapped, the pocket radio he had when he escaped from prison. Everything is organized and tagged, like the fragmentary objects of those remote everyday lives preserved in the display cases of museums; material traces of a lost world.

  I see the Liberty Chief revolver he had in his back pocket when they arrested him at the airport in London, the road maps of Mexico and Alabama and Georgia, the Canadian passport of Ramon George Sneyd, opened to the page with the faded photograph, the hint of a smile, the horn-rimmed glasses, the jacket and
tie. There’s also the other passport, identical except for the spelling of the last name, SNEYA; the birth certificate and the vaccination record; the jacket of the first suit he ever owned, the one that was made to measure in Montreal. I see the bill from the hotel, but I can’t read what it says, not even the check-in and check-out dates, just the logo in blue capital letters on the header; it is one of those receipts that one puts in a pocket and ends up keeping for no reason, involuntary relics that register a moment in time with more precision than a memory.

  * * *

  I have come from so far away to see these objects up close. I peek inside the ’66 Mustang, not the one he drove but otherwise identical, the most valuable thing he ever owned, the red leather interior, the ivory knobs on the radio, the silver silhouette of the bronco on the radiator, the gleaming chrome, the Alabama plates, the U.S.-Mexican border sticker on the windshield, dated October 1967.

  I study every detail as closely as possible. I step back to look at something else but end up returning right away, leaning on the glass, making sure there is nothing I have missed, oblivious to all the people around me, including you.

  I recognize everything and yet there is something in every one of these objects that feels inexplicably strange, the hint of a secret that I would have never guessed had I not seen them in person. There is something repulsive about them, perhaps the material unpleasantness of things cheaply made and worn from use. The pocket radio looks precarious. It is so small that sounds, voices, and music could have only come out weak and distorted. He would have had to press it hard against his ear to hear anything. The shampoo bottle is one of those tiny plastic containers that you find in cheap hotels; the bag is imitation leather and has a plastic zipper and handle; the synthetic blanket is filthy; the toothbrush has a clear plastic handle and yellowed bristles; the revolver is smaller than I imagined—a short barrel that looks like a tap with the grip crudely wrapped in dirty tape. Objects say what we don’t; they reveal in public what we would prefer to keep secret. What they say without words makes fiction irrelevant.