Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  “I guess not,” said Malcolm. “Damn shame, though. I was just over there.”

  Eddie clapped him on the back. “Get yourself together. They gon’ start their march soon. Time to wake these country Negroes up.”

  Malcolm’s nod was vague and as Eddie drifted away, he surveyed the crowd. Some white nuns and priests had appeared. A group of black teachers stood together, watching as one of their number knelt down and used her lipstick to make a sign. Young men wandered through the crowd wearing jackets that said “Invaders.” They were supposed to be some kind of activist group.

  Malcolm spotted his father at the same time his father spotted him. The older man was perched with Sonny on a low wall across the street from the church, both holding their placards with the emphatic red lettering on a field of white: I AM A MAN. Malcolm wandered over.

  “Hey, Pop,” he said, removing his shades. “Sonny.”

  Pop said, “Mornin’, Junie.”

  Sonny said, “Hey.”

  “What time is this supposed to begin?” asked Malcolm.

  “About ten,” said Pop. “But now they sayin’ King been held up. So don’t nobody know when it gon’ start.”

  “You got a good-size crowd,” said Malcolm, squinting a little as he took in the growing throng.

  Pop nodded. “More of them than us,” he said.

  Malcolm said, “What do you mean?”

  Pop shrugged. “At the beginning, this was just about us sanitation mens. Now it’s about…” He paused, surveyed the crowd, hunched his shoulders again. “Hell, I don’t know what it’s about now.”

  “People just want to support you, Pop. They’re standing behind you, trying to make sure you get what you deserve.”

  At that moment, a teenaged boy walked past, saying to no one in particular, “We’re going to get us some white folks today.”

  Pop stared at Malcolm, his eyes questioning. Malcolm held his eyes for only a moment. Then he looked away.

  There was a wrongness here.

  Bob could not name it, but he felt it, deep in his bones. This was his first protest march and he didn’t know what he had expected, but he knew he hadn’t expected this: to find himself wondering if he was safe among the people he was marching to support.

  “We’re going to get us some white folks today,” some passing teenaged boy said.

  Bob stared after him in disbelief. Janeka reached for his hand.

  “Don’t pay that fool any mind,” she said. “He’s just some boy running off at the mouth.”

  Bob nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. For years, he had dreamt of joining a protest march led by the great Martin Luther King. He had dreamt of this like some kids dreamt of being Mercury 7 astronauts or having a catch with Mickey Mantle. He had watched, breathless, the nightly news coverage of King’s great protests in Birmingham, St. Augustine, Selma, and he had wondered—barely an adolescent, not even shaving yet, but he had wondered—if he had what it took, if, when the moment came, he would be strong enough in his faith to stand there and take it while some mob of vicious racists kicked him and punched him and called him every dirty name in the book, yet not raise a hand back to them and, indeed, pray for them even as they harmed him.

  His perplexed parents called him “tenderhearted” when he complained about the injustices the Negroes had to endure. Oh, they agreed that, as his father once put it, the Negroes got a “bad deal down there,” but they didn’t see why he felt that he, personally, had to do something about it. They didn’t see why he couldn’t just send some of the money he earned working part-time to the NAACP or some such group and be done with it. They didn’t see why he insisted that he needed to do more, much less what that sense of obligation had to do with being a Christian.

  But then, he had long since realized, to his mild disappointment, that his parents defined that word differently than he did. They were willing enough to spend Sunday mornings in church, to put a little extra into the poor box at Christmas, and to donate one of Estelle Carson’s famous lemon pound cakes for the annual church picnic. But the idea of faith as an activist thing, the idea that it could require one to give one’s own body in sacrifice for a good cause, struck them as, well…extreme.

  So they had watched their oldest son with a kind of awed fascination and inchoate fear as he bubbled over in his enthusiastic admiration for John Lewis, a Negro college student whose skull was fractured on a bridge in Selma, or Jim Zwerg, a white college student who had his back broken at a bus station in Montgomery. Not that he wanted to be hurt like them, he had explained quickly, but he wanted God to test him as He had tested them. He wanted to know that he could pass that test, that he had the courage to put his faith into action.

  Concerned, Bob’s parents had asked their pastor, Oliver Purvis, a mild, bespectacled Presbyterian who owned a used car lot in town (“A Fair Deal—You Have My Word On It”) to talk to their son. Reverend Purvis had dutifully tried to convince Bob that it was enough simply to want better for the Negroes and all of God’s mistreated children, to send money and prayers to help them and that it wasn’t necessary to bleed for them.

  Bob had listened politely and when the preacher was finished he said, “Yes, sir, but Dr. King says that if a man hasn’t found something he’s willing to die for, he’s not fit to live. Don’t you believe that?”

  Purvis had swallowed hard and said, “Well, yes, I do, but this isn’t your fight, now is it?”

  And Bob had said, “Yes, but what about where the Bible says, ‘Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us?’”

  Fifteen years old and staring earnestly at the man who had once sprinkled water onto his face and pronounced him baptized. Reverend Purvis had given him a strange look. Then he said, “Well, you know, Bobby, you’ve given me a lot to think about.” And he excused himself, and did not return.

  So Bob had continued to dream of this moment, of one day having the opportunity to march behind Martin Luther King.

  But he had not dreamt it would be like this.

  There was an anger here he had not expected. It wasn’t just the loud brashness of some kid. No, you could sense it, you could smell it, you could see it.

  He looked around at the young men in the berets, their eyes behind dark glasses.

  He looked at the high school kids making their own makeshift signs: FUCK MAYOR LOEB said one. LOEB EAT SHIT said another.

  He looked at the preachers looking at their watches and assuring everyone within earshot that Dr. King would be here soon.

  He looked at the students, laughing and joking and yelling out the names of their schools like some kind of challenge—or threat.

  He looked at the marshals with their yellow armbands, trying to get the students to pipe down, line up, behave.

  He looked at the white people, still scanning for other white people.

  He looked at the men, the sanitation workers who stood together in their ill-fitting coats and shiny pants, with their faces carved and eyes squinted by endless years of riding on trucks and toting garbage through sun and cold, the men who seemed somehow shrunken, lost, and even forgotten in this crush of disparate people gathered in their name.

  A boy paraded through the crowd holding high a tree branch. From it dangled two objects. One was a noose. The other was a sign that read, LOEB’S HANGING TREE. “Oh yeah,” the boy said through a broad grin, “this here is gon’ be a nonviolent, peaceful march. Yes, sir!” He rolled his eyes. All around him, young people shrieked with hysterical laughter.

  Bob stood there watching this confusion on Hernando Street in front of the Clayborn Temple and heard himself whisper his doubts to the bright morning air. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “I really don’t know.”

  The crowd was growing. A police helicopter chopped its way through the air above. And it was getting hot. The sun, having burned its way through the morning clouds, was making up for lost time.

  Off came jackets and coats. Newspapers and leaflets fluttered beneath s
hining faces, having been pressed into service as impromptu fans.

  “Fuck nonviolence,” a rangy, dark-skinned man was saying. “One of them crackers bust me upside my head, I’m gon’ put that bastard on the ground. You best believe that.”

  Malcolm felt his father tense and he knew Pop was about to confront the man. He was thankful when some preacher got there first. “Brother,” he said, “I appreciate your feelings, but this is a nonviolent march, and if you can’t accept that discipline, then we just ask respectfully that you do not participate.”

  The man’s mouth worked for a moment as he regarded the man in the clerical collar. “I’m just sayin’,” he finally said. “That’s all.”

  “I understand,” said the preacher. His voice was all reason and calm. “But we still ask that you do not disrupt what we are trying to do. Can I count on you for that?”

  The man glared. “Ain’t disruptin’ nothin’. Just sayin’.”

  When the preacher didn’t respond, the man flung his hands in a gesture of dismissal and walked away. The preacher shook his head, then glanced at his watch as he wandered off through the crowd. “Everybody be cool,” he was saying. “We’ll be starting in a minute.”

  “Glad he got rid of that fool,” said Pop. He nudged Sonny. “Ain’t never lifted a tub a day in his life. What the hell he doin’ here? What make him think he got the right to run his mouth?”

  “You could say that about a lot of them,” said Sonny.

  “You think you could do it, Pop?” asked Malcolm.

  “Do what?”

  “Stand there and take it while some whitey beats on you?”

  Pop pursed his lips. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “But I’m willing to try.”

  “Lord have mercy,” said Sonny. “Look at this fool.” He was pointing toward a man who stood unsteadily in the street near a group of high school students, hoisting a bottle of cheap wine. The students’ laughter was harsh and loud.

  “Don’t bogart the whole thing, Pops!” one boy yelled.

  “Yeah, save some of that for me!” another cried.

  “You gon’ drink after him?” some girl asked, scandalized.

  “Hell, wine’s wine,” said the boy and the ugly laughter renewed itself.

  There were, now that Malcolm looked, a number of disheveled men drifting through the crowd. There were pimps in flashy suits, hair straight as a ruler and gleaming with congolene. There were hustlers in straw stingy brims and pencil moustaches, eyes always on the make, sizing up the crowd. The shifty dregs of Beale Street, on the way home from their nighttime revels, had detoured by to enjoy the spectacle.

  There were so many people out here. Thousands. Easily, thousands. Where had they all come from?

  “You right,” said Sonny. “Ain’t even our march no more.”

  “You know, Miss Parker said she was coming,” said Malcolm. “I don’t like the idea of her being out in the middle of all this.” He had to raise his voice as the orbit of the police helicopter brought it right overhead.

  Pop had little use for Nanny Parker. Her very existence was a reminder of the bad times, all the days Malcolm had sought refuge over there. But even he shook his head now and said, “No, that old lady got no business being out here. Too many people, too much confusion.”

  A man was passing out placards with sticks attached so the signs could be hoisted into the air. MACE WON’T STOP TRUTH, they read. One girl read this without apparent interest. Then she flipped the sign over and pried the stick off. As the placard fell into the street, she lifted the stick for her friends to see. “Look!” she cried.

  Moments later, placards littered the street and sticks, like pine wood swords, began to wave high above the crowd.

  It was about eleven when the white Lincoln Continental finally came gliding down the street. The young people in the crowd pressed themselves against it, slapping at it, pounding on it, or just touching it, laying hands on it as though they might draw some magic, some knowledge, some valuable essence, just from contact with the metal.

  The car nosed its way through the people and finally stopped, unable to move any further. The crowd had simply congealed around it.

  Bob climbed atop a low stone wall next to some sanitation men. He reached down and gave Janeka his hand so that she could come up as well. It gave them a perfect vantage point.

  What they saw was chaos.

  The people—and most of them were children, laughing, giggling, giddy—were mashed so heavily against the car that the doors could not be opened. “Hey, Dr. King,” they sang out. “Hey, Martin!”

  “Move back!” cried one of the marshals.

  “Give them some space!” cried another.

  They were trying to shove the young people off the car, but there was nowhere for them to go, so tightly was the crowd massed.

  “People in the back, move back!” cried a man in a clerical collar. “Give them some room!”

  “This is a mess,” said Bob.

  “You got that right,” said the sanitation man standing on his left.

  It took a long time. The men inside the car were trapped there until a group of ministers linked arm in arm bulled their way through the crowd. A window came down and one of the ministers, a stocky man with a large, square head, leaned in for what looked like urgent consultation with the men inside.

  Still the crowd jostled and pushed. Bob was grateful he’d had the foresight to seek sanctuary on this wall off to the side. “I didn’t think it was going to be like this,” he told Janeka. It felt almost like an apology.

  After a moment, the preachers managed to push the crowd back far enough for the door to swing open. A dark-skinned man with blunt features stepped out first, and Bob recognized him as Ralph Abernathy, King’s best friend and second-in-command. He buttoned his coat as he looked over the crowd. He did not seem pleased.

  Then another man stepped out of the car and this, finally, was Martin Luther King. The crowd went wild. They surged forward, straining to touch him, reaching to lay hands on the top of his head, his shoulder, his hand, the hem of his garment.

  Like they reached toward Jesus, thought Bob. The thought was unnerving.

  “My Lord,” said Janeka, reading his thoughts yet again, “you’d think it was the Second Coming.”

  The ministers staggered under the onslaught, but the line held and they surrounded King and cleared a path to the front of the march. Martin Luther King was not a big man. Rather, he was on the short side, with a stocky build going over to outright fat. But in the midst of that crowd he seemed smaller still, flotsam bobbing on a tide of human passion. Pushed and shoved and yanked about, people screaming and shouting, a police helicopter beating the air above him, he looked anxious, even scared.

  Bob looked closer, then, and realized there was something else in those eyes. Exhaustion. A grinding fatigue. Martin Luther King was so tired he could barely stand.

  The phalanx of ministers almost carried him through the crowd.

  “Give way!” they shouted.

  “Clear the way!”

  A flatbed truck stood at the intersection, mounted with news cameras. One of the ministers shouted, “Get the sanitation men up front with Dr. King!”

  “Guess that’s us,” said the man next to Bob to a friend on the other side.

  The two men stepped down from the wall and began making their way toward the front. A boy came up from behind, elbows high, pushing his way through the crowd. He caught the taller man in the chest and almost knocked him down. The boy didn’t stop, didn’t even pause.

  “You all right?” asked the taller man’s friend.

  The taller man just shook his head and spoke in a bitter voice. “Like I told you: more of them than us.”

  Malcolm watched as the mob—it was difficult to think of this unruly mass as a march—stretched itself down Hernando and then, far up in the distance, swung left on Beale. His father, he knew, was somewhere up in the front with the other sanitation men, j
ostled and pushed by high school boys trying to get close to Dr. King. Now Malcolm, who had hung back, brought up the rear, walking in an assemblage of young men with sunglasses, T-shirts, and Invaders jackets.

  He was thinking about his father, whom he’d watched shoved aside by some boy running to see King.

  The truth was, he felt sorry for Pop, for all the sanitation men whose great march was being taken from them by unruly children. Even now, a trio of teenaged boys was running up and back on the sidewalk along the sides of the mob—the march—laughing and giggling like they were at the state fair. At 19, Malcolm was only three or four years older, but it felt like a gulf of decades.

  It wasn’t fair to the sanitation men, what was happening. Much less what was going to happen.

  But, he reminded himself, it needed to happen. All of it needed to happen. These men needed to learn that Martin Luther King was not some savior with magic powers and a fancy suit. This city and this country needed to learn that henceforth, they would have to deal with a new movement that was impatient by design, that would not be mollified by marches and pretty speeches, that would demand—and take—what black people were rightfully owed.

  From far ahead, the sound of singing drifted back on the warm morning air. “We shall overcome,” the voices caroled, the melody stately and yet from this distance, somehow insubstantial and frail.

  “We shall overcome,” they sang. “We shall overcome, someday.”

  Pulling at the last syllable, running it up and down the scale, through colorations of want, need, and hope.

  Someday. A pathetic word, freighted with too damn much patience. Why couldn’t they see that? What was it about getting old that leeched the fire from your bones and made you content with singing hymns to maybe, possibly, and tomorrow? Malcolm didn’t understand and hoped he never would. All at once, he was reminded of a rock song this white boy at his college used to play in the dorms over and over again.

  “Hope I die before I get old,” the singer sneered. Amen to that, amen to that.

  “Down with Loeb! Down with Loeb! Down with Loeb!”