September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “You noticed?”

  “I was busy with my lofty ideas and they wandered around charming the Germans.”

  He picked up the paper again.

  “They don’t mention my dissertation on the Marshall Plan, but they are obsessed with the clothes this breathtaking woman wore.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Gee, what would they have said if she was really beautiful and not the worn-out mother of five children?”

  I threw the book review section at him.

  Then we both laughed and dissolved into each other’s arms.

  “Isn’t this a bitchin’ picture of me?” April Rosemary stormed into the kitchen, waving a second copy of the Times that had somehow found its way into our house. “Daddy, you look kind of funny in this picture, don’t you?”

  “Daddy always looks that way, dear,” I corrected her. “People call it cute, not funny.”

  “Yes, Mom,” she said with a giggle.

  Then the family poured in—Vangie, the good April, Peg and Vince and their kids. For an hour we were young again and happy again, despite Pat Moynihan’s mordant predictions. All of us argued that Chuck’s presence at Bonn had been unnecessary. He took the position that the assertion was absolutely true. His “breathtaking wife” and his “handsome” children had snatched the bacon of the United States out of the fire. He continued to eat bacon and butter English muffins with raspberry jam as the festival roared. It ended, as all O’Malley family festivals did, in song, the last of which, as usual, was “Rosemarie,” as it usually is.

  I loved seeing him happy again. I didn’t mind the bias of the article. Fuck the New York Times!

  Except I am not breathtaking. No way.

  Then, when everyone went home, we settled down in front of the fireplace with our books and our memories and our grief.

  Then the phone rang. Chuck ignored it. I picked it up.

  “Rosemarie O’Malley,” I said primly.

  “Are you watching Judgment at Nuremberg on the tube?” asked Peg.

  “We’ve had enough of Germany.”

  “They’ve broken into it with pictures from Alabama. The red-necks are murdering Negroes down there.”

  I dashed over to the TV and turned it on.

  “Chuck!” I shouted. “Look!”

  “We are replaying this incident,” said Walter Cronkite, “because we believe it is a historic event in American history. Some six hundred civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, are preparing to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River and to march on to Montgomery fifty miles away. They are about to march two by two across the bridge, led by Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. They intend to protest the denial of voting rights to Negroes in Alabama. Across the river [the camera cut to the other side] Sheriff Jim Clark’s mounted posse awaits them, accompanied by scores of state troopers.”

  As we watched, the Negro group marched onto the bridge. Someone ordered them to halt. They kept on marching till they were face-to-face with the white lawmen. They knelt to pray. Then there was an order to disperse. They did not move, then a voice—later we found out it was the Sheriff’s—shouted, “Get those goddamned niggers!”

  While the whole nation watched, the lawmen charged, swinging clubs, cattle prods, bullwhips, and rubber hoses. They pushed into the crowd, and amid Rebel yells, beat men, women, and children. They rode their horses into people and drove them off the bridge into the river. Clouds of tear gas drifted across the river. The crowd broke up and ran. The police continued their pursuit, smashing heads, trampling over bodies with horses, beating them with bullwhips.

  The TV cameras caught the expressions of orgasmic satisfaction on the faces of the white cops and the pain and fear on the faces of the marchers.

  “In Selma, Alabama,” Cronkite went on solemnly, “the rule of law is Sheriff Jim Clark’s order—‘Get those goddamn niggers!’”

  “My God,” I said, “in the United States!”

  Chuck was grinning.

  “Lewis and Hosea got what they wanted,” he said happily. “Now the whole country knows what the South is like! Sheriff Clark doesn’t know what television can do.”

  “I have to go pack,” I announced, tossing The Spire aside.

  “Pack?” Chuck was still staring at the screen.

  “I’m going down there. We’ll teach those rednecks who won the Civil War.”

  “Lyndon will federalize the National Guard,” he said still bemused. “It’s all over. The Negroes will be voting in the next election.”

  “I’m going to be in the next march!” I yelled, charging for the stairs.

  “Then I guess I’d better be too,” he said, still confused.

  “With your camera!”

  Then, for the first time since he walked out on LBJ, my husband came alive.

  “Hell yes!”

  3

  At Selma I realized that I was a radical, always had been a radical. I had a hell of a good time. I also understood, without Chuck telling me, that I could become a dangerous woman. I discovered that being a radical gave me an adrenaline high. When the white cops who looked and acted like they were characters out of a Faulkner novel shouted obscenities, you yelled back at them that they were redneck trash. When they clutched their batons as if they were going to club you or threatened to turn loose their guard dogs, you snarled that we were going to turn Selma over to the Negroes and drive them into the swamps where they belonged with the other animals.

  Well, I said that. It was perhaps too literary an insult. Moreover, Peg, who was with me at all times to make sure I restrained my tongue, absolutely forbade me to use any obscenity.

  “You must not sink to their level,” she insisted.

  “I didn’t go to Rosary College,” I told her, “so I don’t know how to be a lady. I don’t even wear gloves when it’s not cold.”

  Peg ignored me as she always did when I said something stupid.

  “Besides, you shouldn’t shock these poor boys who are gritting their teeth and protecting us,” she said, gesturing toward the teenagers of the Alabama National Guard, who were now under federal command.

  “With the stars and bars pins on their uniform! They’re as bad as Sheriff Clark’s bozos!”

  “They now work for the United States government,” she insisted, “and they’re obeying orders, no matter how hard it is. We should respect their integrity.”

  That’s Peg for you. She was becoming more and more like her mother, the good April, a woman who thought benignly of everyone, even if they were not Irish, because after all, it wasn’t their fault they weren’t Irish. Occasionally I reflected that we were now older than the good April (Chuck’s mother) was when I adopted their family—thereby as my shrinks have insisted saving my life. Just as I had deteriorated through the years, Peg had grown more lovely, a slender elegant symphony in brown just like her mother. I explained the contrast between us by the fact that she only had four children and I had five. Chuck once claimed that we were two forest animals, she a sleek timber wolf and I a prowling cougar. Now she was a grand duchess like her mother and I a shrewish, shanty-Irish fishwife—no matter what the New York Times said about my performance in Bonn.

  When I announced to her on the phone that Chuck and I were flying to Selma to finish what the Civil War had not finished, she replied that she and Vince were coming with us, he to protect Chuck from being beaten up again like he was in Little Rock and she to help me keep my big mouth shut. “You must not call those poor people white trash,” she had insisted, “it’s just as bad as calling Negroes niggers.”

  The four of us were obviously crazy. Nine cousins in our two families—my five and Rosie’s four—and we were going to Selma. There was no one in the crazy O‘Malley family to tell us not to fly to Atlanta, rent a car, and drive to Selma. Father Ed O’Malley, my husband’s youngest sibling, was organizing a group to respond to Martin Luther
King’s plea to people of all faiths to rally around those who wanted to march through Selma and on to Montgomery in support of the voting rights bill President Kennedy had pushed for. As the good April said, “Well, if Father Edward thinks it’s all right, then it must be all right.”

  Lyndon, to give the devil his due as Chuck said, had delivered a powerful speech. Selma, he told the nation, was not a Negro problem or a Southern problem. It was an American problem. It was deadly wrong to deny anyone in America the right to vote. He ended by telling the people of the country in his rich Central Texas accent, “We shall overcome!”

  He federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers and those who had come to support them. Now it will be safe, I told myself. Then I repeated the reassurance to my husband, who was having second thoughts.

  “That,” he replied, “is what the man said on Fort Sumter.”

  As we were departing the elder O’Malley house—having left the nine cousins in charge of their grandmother and grandfather, Chuck’s doubts became more serious, surely because of his memories of Little Rock. He would go and the rest of us would stay at home. We vetoed that suggestion.

  The cousins didn’t mind a few days away from their parents. Grandma April spoiled them rotten and they knew it. Only April Rosemary had her doubts. “I wish you wouldn’t go to that terrible place, Mom,” she said as she hugged me, tears in her eyes.

  I was too caught up in being part of a great turning point in American history to understand. You see, Chuck had been at the Mc-Carthy hearings and in Korea and in Little Rock. All I had ever done was to smile at people in Bonn. It was time for me to become part of the action.

  The Kennedy wake and funeral, for some reason, didn’t count.

  Peg’s marriage had been rocky at first. When Vince came home from the prisoner of war camp in Korea, he had been a real problem—sorry for himself and angry that no one else seemed sorry for him. Well, I had straightened him out in my best shanty-Irish-shrew style and that was that. I never had any problems with Chuck … How could I? He had a hell of a lot of problems with me until I sobered up.

  The atmosphere in the Negro section of Selma as we do-gooders swarmed in was unbearably exciting. The Negroes (as they were then called) could hardly believe that we white folks had come to support them. We could hardly believe how poor and oppressed they were. We hugged and kissed and sang “We Shall Overcome” all night long. I hardly saw my husband. He was scampering around, clutching his Leica (which Trudi, his German love when he was in the Constabulary, had given him) and blazing away fearlessly. No wonder the thugs had got him in Little Rock. He seemed to think that because he was short and boyish and innocent, the rednecks wouldn’t see him. Twice, Vince later told me, groups of good ole boys closed in on him, with booze on their breath and murder in their eyes. Then they saw Vince, in the same shape he was in when he made All-American guard at Notre Dame, and reconsidered their options.

  “Where were the soldiers?” I demanded, suddenly afraid.

  “They can’t be everywhere. The orders are that the marchers should stay on this side of the river till tomorrow and the white folk on the other side. Chuck figures that because he’s press, he can go wherever he wants.”

  The adrenaline drained temporarily from my bloodstream. I wanted to go home.

  Chuck was indeed press. His friends at the New York Times had commissioned him to do a photographic essay to be called “Selma!”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he reassured me. “I talked to Bobby this afternoon. Lyndon has persuaded Governor George Wallace to keep his big mouth shut and, just in case, he’s put on alert a battalion of Marines at Camp Lejeune. Bobby doesn’t think we’ll need them.”

  Where, I wondered, had my exhausted and shivering husband found a line on which to talk to Bobby. Then I realized that Bobby had found him.

  We huddled in a sharecropper’s barn outside Selma the night before the march to Montgomery. It was cold, not as cold as Chicago in March but plenty cold. We sang most of the night. Some of the northern whites were drinking to stay warm, not plastered by any means but, as the Irish say, a bit of the drink had been taken. A few of the kids from New York were smoking pot, the first time I had ever seen that.

  “Bobby has cut a deal between Dr. King and the cops. Only a hundred and fifty of us will actually cross the bridge with him tomorrow, most of them will be local Negroes plus some church people from the north, those two Corondolet nuns from St. Louis, up in the first row with him. Eddie will be right behind them. The rest of you will drive or bus down to Montgomery and meet us in front of the State House.”

  “What’s this ‘you and us’ stuff?”

  “You can’t come,” he replied, “because they don’t need any shanty-Irish faces in the crowd and I can come because they need a photographer with an international reputation for courage under fire.”

  “You’re not scared?” Vince asked.

  “Terrified,” my brave knight admitted.

  “Why the small crowd?” Peg asked.

  “Easier for the troops to protect on the march. To the TV camera, a handful of people crossing the river looks like a mob. Then in front of the State House, they’ll open up the lens and everyone can see that there are thousands.”

  Then and there I made up my mind that I would be in the march. I had never walked fifty miles in my life. Well, it was time to try.

  The next morning was cold and gray. At the car, where SCLC marshals were trying to line up the convoy to Montgomery, I kissed Peg and hugged her big lug.

  “If I don’t make it, take good care of the kids,” I whispered, and then dashed away before they could talk me out of it. No way was I about to let Chucky Ducky have all the fun.

  That shows how immature I was. I thought it was a movie and we were the good guys.

  No one tried to stop me as I joined the band of marchers at the bridge. I found Ed in his Roman collar and one of Chuck’s Ike jackets from Bamberg.

  “Need a broken-down Irish housewife to walk with you, Father?”

  He grinned at me, “I would have bet all the money I have that you’d show up … And I reject the adjective and the noun.”

  As Ed has matured in his priestly vocation, he has become talkative, not like Chuck, of course, but he has the flair even if he is less outrageous. He thinks I’m someone special because he claims I gave him good advice when he was thinking of leaving the priesthood. All I did was listen …

  “Scared?” I asked him.

  “Sure am … You?”

  “On a high … I hope you or my pint-sized husband or someone is around when I come down off it.”

  Then Dr. King began to speak, his deep baritone voice drowning out the wind. I don’t remember what he said. The important thing was that he said it. Then we joined hands, sang “We Shall Overcome,” and marched onto the bridge.

  I was sky-high. I wondered briefly whether my high was anything like getting drunk. I promised God that I would never permit such a high again—a promise I did not always keep—and asked him to take care of my husband and children.

  It never occurred seriously to me for a moment that my husband’s life might be in danger, much less my own.

  The situation was scary. Sheriff Clark and his mounted police were lined up along the riverbank. The State Police were right behind them, their dogs-poor-white-trash dogs, I thought—were straining at their leashes. On the main street of the town, crowds of angry whites were shouting obscenities. Protecting our line of march were these poor kids in the National Guard, obeying their orders like good soldiers, though they probably would have been much happier if they were swinging their riffle butts against us.

  Shut up you bitch, I told myself. They’re brave young men doing their duty.

  So far.

  What if the strain was too much for them? What if the cries of the white crowd, the barking of the dogs, the singing of a hymn they must have hated, the determined march all proved too much for them? What
if they broke ranks and joined the mob?

  Where the hell was Lyndon’s battalion of Marines when we really needed them?

  Then I was off the bridge and on the street. We were marching through Selma!

  “Smile for the camera, lady!” a familiar voice cried. “You too, fadder!”

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley, act your age!”

  “Yes, ma‘am … We’ll call this one ‘priest marches with beautiful woman!’”

  And off he scampered, like an organ grinder’s little monkey.

  Take good care of him, I instructed the Lord. What would I do without him.

  I imagined that I heard a voice saying, don’t worry!

  I did just the same.

  We managed to get through the town and out on the highway. The tension eased. Jim Clark’s people had made their point and went home, unaware perhaps that the South, their South, would never be the same. The marchers were protected on all sides by the troops, State Police, the National Guard, and federal marshals—jeeps in front of us, jeeps on either side of us, jeeps behind us. Bobby meant business. He was not about to permit a single incident to plunge the march into bloody chaos.

  This was after all, the United States of America, a hundred years, almost to the day since Appomattox Court House. I wanted to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but I figured that Dr. King would not approve.

  Fifty miles is a long distance, longer than I would have thought possible. By the time our bedraggled band joined the huge throng in front of the State House, I was numb with cold and exhaustion and my voice was hoarse. At some points along the march only Dr. King and I were singing. I was ready to collapse. Indeed I would have collapsed if Ed had not grabbed me.

  “I’m fine, Ed, just fine,” I said bravely. “How many days have we been on the road?”

  Chucky bounced by me and kissed me quickly.

  “Proud of you, Rosemarie my darling.” He hummed a few bars from our song and then dashed up to the podium. Somehow the soldiers knew that he should not be stopped.