by James Philip
Ivan Allen knew his turn was about to come. Having run through his speech countless times in recent days he tried to concentrate on calming his nerves, and composing his soul for the forthcoming trial. He was accustomed to public speaking, to coping with all manner of heckling, and each and every manifestation of stage fright; today was different. This was the largest assembly he would ever address in his life and this was possibly the most important day of his life. On this day the eyes of America were on the city and he spoke for Atlanta.
Involuntarily, he glanced sidelong to his left where is wife sat between him and Dr King and his wife, Coretta. Beyond the leader of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach stared fixedly to his front. Once it was decided that Katzenbach’s boss, the Attorney General was not attending the ‘Oakland Cemetery Event’, there had been an unseemly scramble to find a full Cabinet member to send down to Atlanta and Stewart Udall, the Secretary for the Interior had drawn the short straw. Udall a former three-term Congressman from Arizona - like Katzenbach another Army Air Force veteran from the forty-five war in which he had flown 454th Bomb Group B-24 Liberators based in Italy – had caviled at being dragged away from Philadelphia at the very moment the House was attempting to salami-slice his department’s budget appropriation for 1965-66. Given that in the US system the Department of the Interior might more correctly have been described as ‘the Department of Everything Else’, that is, everything else nobody wanted to have to worry about; everything from water, land and mineral rights to Indian Affairs, Udall took the view that his ‘office’ needed every cent listed in the 1965-66 allocation, and had long planned to be in Philadelphia over the weekend bending old friends’ ears.
Ivan Allen’s wife, Louise, smiled tight-lipped.
They had discussed the text of the short speech he planned to make in the coming minutes, and agreed that they were doing the right thing. It was one thing for Allen to put his head above the parapet in his own back yard; another entirely to publicly invite the whole South to have a pop at him. Jim Crow’s spirit was alive and well in the surrounding states and the Klu Klux Klan was malignantly resurgent from the Carolinas to Mississippi. If times were not already bad enough there was always room for them to get worse.
Nearly fifteen hundred Georgia State Troopers and National Guardsmen patrolled the perimeter of the forty-eight acre cemetery. Inside it Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had merged into the huge crowds, and Atlanta PD officers armed with carbines and pump action shotguns stood watchfully in a cordon covering the flanks and rear of the ‘stage party’. In between the front row of that ‘party’ and the swaying waves of humanity stood a single thin line of Dr King’s people, backed up by two dozen police officers in their normal service uniforms but armed only with night sticks – each of which they had been ordered to place on the grass at their feet - and side arms.
At the time of its founding the cemetery had been on land to the south of the city. The original six acre plot situated in the south east corner of the ‘modern’ Oakland Cemetery was one of the oldest surviving historic sites in Atlanta; most of the rest of the Civil War era city having been burned down in 1864. In the last century the burial ground had been subsumed, and surrounded by the growth of Atlanta until in the modern era it sat squarely within the urban sprawl to the south of the great matrix of railway lines and marshalling yards that delineated the central districts of the city from the south eastern suburbs.
About half of the cemetery was a general burial ground – that is, areas undefined by race, religion, ethnicity or the cruelties of history – which lay outside the original ‘six acres’, the Confederate section, the ‘New’ Jewish section, and the combined Potter’s Field and Black sections. Students of such things maintained that the Confederate section, in 1863 and 1864 located within half-a-mile of several hospitals was the last resting place of some seven thousand fallen from that war. The burial count for the ‘New Jewish’ section, which dated to the latter part of the nineteenth century was less certain, but probably similar to that in the Confederate section, while the number of the dead in the Black section was anybody’s guess because unlike elsewhere in the cemetery, its wooden crosses had mostly rotted long ago while the marble, rock and cement gravestones and memorials in the other sections had survived.
Most Georgian historians agreed that between sixty and seventy thousand souls had been laid to rest in the hallowed ground of Oakland Cemetery. Although the last family ‘plots’ had been sold as long ago as 1884, burials continued in them, and in other plots reserved by the city. It was only right that the dead of Bedford Pine Park should lie in honor in this place, forever protected close to the heart of the great city of Atlanta.
Five members of Dr King’s entourage had been shot dead or subsequently died of their wounds that day in February. Three others including Dr King had been seriously wounded. That tragedy had been compounded by the panic in the packed crowds around the stage where one hundred and seventy-nine people had been killed, crushed and trampled in the press and another forty-three badly injured.
Suddenly Ivan Allen was standing at the barrage of microphones gazing out across the sea of faces, black and white intermingled for as far as the eye could see. The pity of it was that it had taken grief and shock, and fear to finally bring people together. Fear and the sickening knowledge that outside the gates of Oakland Cemetery the laws and attitudes of the slave-owning Old South still held sway over great tracts of the same Confederacy that had supposedly crushed a century ago.
“We live in a city forever marked like Cain by the tide of this nation’s Civil War. We live in a city immortalized in the literature and the public imagination of all Americans by tragedies which happened before any of us here today were born. Men from this great city have proudly fought in all of America’s wars, and their blood now lies on foreign fields, courageously shed to guard our freedom.”
Allen was no barnstorming orator. His public speaking ‘gifts’, such as they were, were of the accomplished, competent variety for he had learned his craft among friends and like-minded men and women, rarely stepping off the safe path of least resistance. He had been reluctant to challenge segregationist shibboleths, or to break away from the straightjacket of bigoted Southern Democrat orthodoxy in any way. He had been a businessman, active in the local commercial community, a leading light of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce who basically, had gone along with a lot of things he personally, and morally, found distasteful most of his adult life until he ran for Mayor in 1961. Unfettered by the native racism of his opponent in that race he had found himself, almost by accident, speaking for and with Atlanta’s largely disenfranchised colored people and through his contacts with members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, almost inadvertently confronted the indefensible iniquities of generations of racial prejudice.
“The cost of the Bedford Pine Park atrocity fell disproportionately upon the African-American population of our city.” Until lately he would never have used that term, non-whites were ‘blacks’ or ‘coloreds’, descriptions bandied around like insults. “Elsewhere in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi men who ought to have known better, who ought to have better understood the grace of the merciful Lord that looks over us all that they too profess to obey and worship, averted their eyes. The evil men responsible for the shots that sparked the Bedford Pine Park tragedy knew not what they had done.”
The Mayor of Atlanta had to pause, choked by the emotions of the moment. His prepared script fluttered in a quirk of the sultry breeze blowing across the gathering.
“I have a confession to make,” he continued. “When I ran for Mayor I wasn't an all-fired up liberal. It was only when I saw what the race-baiters were doing to hold back the orderly commercial growth of Atlanta that it infuriated me so much it swung me to the extreme end opposite them. What Christian man or woman can claim that segregation is anything other than the
stepchild of slavery?”
The murmuring in the throng before him was swelling.
Ivan Allen held up his hands.
“Men of good faith may sometimes come slowly to righteousness but sooner or later they will see the light. Across the South things will change. Things must change!”
Now he had to wait for the cries of the multitude to subside.
“Our lives are the true tests of our faith. Two years ago I flew to France to help identify and to bring home the bodies of over a hundred of this city’s leading citizens, many of whom had been close personal friends. They had gone to Paris as ambassadors for Atlanta and our great country and died when Air France Flight 007 crashed at Orly Airport. I knew few of the dead of Bedford Pine Park personally but I grieve no less for them; their only sin was to dream of a better future for us all. Many of the dead of Bedford Pine Park were young, the flower of our city, state and nation. The agony I experienced walking along the rows of the bodies of the innocent victims of the disaster was no less than that I experienced in Paris as I walked along the rows of the bodies of my dead friends and neighbors. I pray to God that I never have to experience it again.”
The murmuring approbation of the first ranks in the crowd was almost musical, a low rumbling base note washing towards the podium.
“Our great country has survived the ‘war to end all wars’. Am I alone in believing that providence has saved us for some greater purpose than simply surviving? I think not. I believe we are better than that! My personal journey to see the light was long; but I got there in the end!”
Allen had stopped reading from his notes.
“When I ran for Mayor my liberalism on the issue of race and segregation was based on common sense, not any kind of moral imperative to right ancient wrongs. I wanted Atlanta to be an ‘open city’ because I believed it would be good for business and that what was good for business would benefit every citizen of the city. I wanted Atlanta to be a ‘city too busy to hate’, a city that grew and became so prosperous that its poorest people no longer needed to claim city or state reliefs. That is still my dream; but now I know that this is not enough!”
He was sweating heavily, breathless, carried along on the euphoria of the moment.
“Doctor King has pointed the way ahead. Now it is time for the Administration and the Congress in Philadelphia to act. Whatever else is going on in the World we cannot dodge the real issue. We cannot forever be looking back over our shoulder, turning the clocks back to the eighteen-sixties or to laws that were passed when William Tecumseh Sherman was still alive. At stake is the future of our children and generations as yet unborn. At stake is the moral authority, the very soul of our country. In this generation we must abolish slavery’s misbegotten stepchild. We must eliminate segregation in all its hateful, invidious forms and make all Americans as free under the law of this land as they already are under God’s sight!”
Chapter 6
Saturday 6th June 1964
Berkeley, California
While, during and after Nathan Zabriski attacked her many thoughts had roiled and flown like tumbleweed in a storm thought Caroline Konstantis’s mind but most of them fell into one of two camps.
This is insane!
Please don’t stop!
It was not any kind of consensual sexual intercourse; he had shut the door behind her and before she could react his hands were under her dress, she was against the wall and he was inside her. But if she had not said ‘yes’, neither had she said ‘no’. In moments she had thrown her arms around his neck and basically let it happen. In retrospect she could hardly claim to be surprised – other than by the clumsy violence of the act – that he had...raped her.
The last time they had been in this house in Berkeley she had been stupid, reckless in her attempts to draw him out. She had grown impatient with his martyr’s guilt, and confused because almost from the first moment she had encountered him at Offutt Air Force Base six months ago she had been, well, a little...crazy. The boy was in her head all the time; he had inadvertently touched something dormant in her, splintered her carefully crafted idea of self. Her professional training told her it had to be connected with some kind of twisted mother-son thing, an Oedipal complex reversed or turned on its head, guilt-driven by her self-evident failure as a mother and a wife, combined with years upon desultory years of self-repression manifesting in itself in a bizarre fetish. And then there was Nathan’s miserable childhood, in which he had continually been handed off to relatives and Air Force welfare services by a schizophrenic mother incapable of coping with life herself, let alone mothering a child as she and Nathan’s coldly disinterested father perambulated between bases at the ends of the earth...
Except that it was probably simpler than that and a lot less perverse; she found him sexually attractive, she had broadcast – both inadvertently and overtly – the fact, and in the end he had reacted in the way a fit, lonely, deeply troubled, sexually active young man in the prime of his life might be expected to respond. A little over three weeks ago she had run away when he had reached out to her, touched her, but today she had come to him. It was like lighting the blue touch paper and waiting to see what happened...
She had not realized how strong he was. Even if she had wanted to resist it would have been useless. He hurt her to start with and then it was almost as if she was outside herself looking down, unresisting, acquiescent and despite the rush of events and the whirling of her thoughts she was coolly rational. She had wanted this – albeit hot necessarily in this way - and that made her compliant, totally to blame and responsible for everything.
She clung to the man as he fucked her up against the wall.
Her world was full of noise, insane...
And then everything was quiet again.
The man was sucking in air, sweating, trembling, inside her still and she was moaning, attempting to clamp her thighs against his hips, shaking with exertion, as breathless and as disorientated as him, her face nuzzling against his.
The hem of Caroline’s party frock was up around her waist, Nathan’s jeans were around his ankles and his weight pinned her against the wall.
“I’m... Sorry...”
She did not register his words for several seconds.
All the air had been crushed out of her lungs and she was sucking in ragged breaths, her head spinning. She felt faint, thought she was going to pass out. Her vision began to return as she stared into the dimness of the hallway. All the drapes were still drawn; had he planned this?
No, he was not that sort of man.
“I’m sorry... I don’t know what...”
Caroline Konstantis blinked, clung to the man’s heaving torso with desperation.
I’m wet...
From the tang in the air she had emptied her bladder during the...
Rape?
She groaned involuntarily, as much in sudden humiliation to have lost control of her...
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”
“Stop saying sorry,” she gasped, groaning again.
The man withdrew from her.
She sagged to the floor, nearly collapsing.
“Oh God, I...” Nathan grabbed her and held her close. “I’m so sorry, I...”
Caroline’s eyes were growing more accustomed to the gloom.
The man was attempting to pull up his jeans while still supporting her.
She laughed what must have sounded like a hysterical giggle or cackle to the man.
No, this was definitely not the way she had thought things would work out. She had had something more sedate, a discrete seduction, soft lights, candles maybe, a spongy mattress, a sensuous disrobing, lingering, lazy mutual explorations and an unhurried, careful, greedy coupling. Standing in a puddle of her own urine while her assailant struggled out of his piss soaked pants feeling like she had just gone ten rounds with Sonny Liston really, really ought to have told her something about being careful what, in her old age, she wished for!
Carolin
e buried her face in his chest and shivered.
“What?” The man asked anxiously.
“Take those things off,” she suggested, trying not to laugh again, knowing that in her present confusion a giggle would emerge as a cackle. “Let go of me, I won’t run away.”
She did, however, put her hand to the wall to stop herself stumbling.
She looked at his half-flaccid nakedness.
Okay, that explains why it hurt so much at the beginning...
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she declared, attempting to stand up straight. This was more uncomfortable than she had anticipated. The man reached to her, she shook off his hand. “I need to go to the bathroom...”
The man was crying.
She would have tried to hold him but he had just raped her.
“I need to clean up,” she muttered, pushing past him. It was only after she had stumbled into the whitewashed, antiseptic smelling bathroom at the back of the bungalow that Caroline Konstantis truly became aware again of her surroundings.
The whole building was spic and span, everything was in its place, scrubbed and ready for inspection. Correctly, she had predicted that Nathan would seek order, attempt to control his environment. He had spent over eight years in the military and been, by all accounts, an exceptional officer; meticulous in his attention to duty, a man who studied and trained with immense diligence, to whom ‘good enough’ was always ‘second best’. Shutting herself in the bathroom she sat a while on the toilet, wet, stinking, bedraggled and numb as slowly, her sensibilities returned, and she started to make a little sense of things.
Eventually, she peeled off her dress. Then she wriggled out of her girdle; she had felt ‘sexy’ in it with her womanhood open to the air beneath her dress. ‘Sexy’ now seemed ‘dirty’ and she did not know what she had been thinking when she bought the thing.
She filled the bath, a big white enamel monstrosity that occupied half the small room. The water was at first apologetically warm and then increasingly cold. The bath’s white enamel was chipped in half-a-dozen places. She unhooked her brassiere, hung it over the single towel rail, and began to soak the semen and the urine from the folds of her party frock. She was in no hurry. Later she sat in the bath until her lower limbs were chilled and she started to shiver.