by James Philip
“Yeah, sure,” he snorted grimly.
Right then if a big bomb had dropped on Offutt Air Base it would have been fine by Major Nathan Zabriski.
Chapter 67
Friday 7th February 1964
Bedford-Pine Park, Atlanta, Georgia
The stage could not possibly have been constructed to support so many bodies, swaying and singing, clapping and cheering in the afternoon heat. However, it was one of those days when regardless of its structural shortcoming it might, if the worst came to the worst, be held up by God’s will alone.
Such was the tenor of Dwayne John’s thoughts as Dr Martin Luther King stepped up to the battery of microphones and the great, seething mass of people in the park quietened and stilled, knowing perhaps that history was in the making and that they were privileged to be its witnesses.
Dwayne and several men who shared his physical dimensions and presence had been at Dr King’s shoulder and guarding his back all through that long, exhilarating day, walking beside him from the Ebenezer Baptist Church down Auburn and Jackson Avenue towards the downtown park now thronged with well over a hundred thousand souls. Most of the faces, moving like the waves of an ocean were black but perhaps one in ten were white, more so the farther one looked towards the boundaries of Bedford-Pine Park.
Dwayne was not alone in thinking of fables such as the Sermon of the Mount, or of Moses coming down from on high bearing tablets of stone. The gathering was one of biblical proportions and the mood ecstatic, celebratory as if a new age had dawned.
He had heard Dr King preach many times, address big crowds, and retain his calm, magisterial dignity in the face of heckling rednecks; today his voice rang with a new musical, quivering command.
“This is a speech I had hoped to deliver on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last year. It is a speech that I will deliver again when we, my brothers and sisters, march on Philadelphia and I stand on the steps of the Philadelphia Capitol!”
The hairs stood up on the back of Dwayne John’s neck.
He and Dr King’s other ‘minders’ had been ordered to stand at least two full paces from their charge and he ached to edge closer. Glancing past the great man his fellow bodyguards all mirrored his anxious eyes.
“Five score years ago a great American signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beckoning light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languishing in the comers of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.”
The crowd was in the palm of the preacher’s hand.
“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to change racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice ring out for all of God's children. There will be neither rest nor tranquillity in America until the Negro is granted citizenship rights. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
Martin Luther King paused, his head turning to gaze out across the multitude before him as he collected his resolve.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”
There was a ringing poetic rhythm to his words as they rang out across Bedford-Pine Park like irresistible waves. The tide of human affairs had turned and no man could stand against the incoming waters.
“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its Governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
The stage was nakedly exposed, overlooked on all sides and the night stick hefting policemen around the park and at the front of the stage were visibly intimidated by the size and the mood of the crowd.
“I have a dream today.”
Dwayne’s whole being was seized by those five magical words.
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and before the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
Sermon and speech, politics and parables all mixed into an unimaginably potent recipe for change; a plea for justice in a new future that was within America’s grasp if only it had the courage to grasp it with both hands.
“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the mount with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the genuine discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, pray together; to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom forever, knowing that we will be free one day.”
We will be free one day!
Dwayne felt drunk with the possibilities of the moment.
“And I say to you today my friends, let freedom ring. From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring. From the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring. From the mighty Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snow capped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only there; let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill in Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
Afterwards, Dwayne John could never explain why he did what he did next. One instant he was transported into what amounted to an altered state of mind by the timbre and the hypnotic call of Martin Luther King’s voice; the next he was bracing himself.
“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we're free at last!’”
There were gasps, screams and then utter Bedlam as the huge, bear-like frame of Dwayne John enveloped, staggered and crashed Dr Martin Luther King to the hard, unyielding boards of the stage.
In the immediate aftermath nobody could recollect whether there had been three or four faint, very distant reports of a rifle barking.
In those awful moments the only thing anybody knew for sure was that around the microphone stands where Dr Martin Luther King had been delivering his call for national redemption; bodies now lay in spreading pools of livid, cardinal blo
od in the bright afternoon sunshine.
And several women were screaming.
[ THE END ]
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Book 3: The Great Society. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you didn’t, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
The sequel to The Great Society, and the fourth book in the Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Series titled Ask Not of Your Country will be published on 31st December 2016.
* * *
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like to briefly – well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse – share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World and where I am coming from with the series.
What is alternative history? How can ‘counterfactuals’ help us better understand the reality of the world in which we live? These are confounding questions which for all their intractability lend themselves to endless possibilities.
One strap line for the Timeline 10/27/62 Series is that ‘the swinging sixties never happened’. Okay, the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong but in this timeline Britain was hard hit but not wiped off the face of the earth; so why did the swinging sixties in some way, shape or form not happen?
To me that question has a relatively simple answer. London got nuked and the Beatles never went to America.
The Great Society ends on Friday 7th February 1964; in our actual, that is, real timeline that was the day that the Beatles arrived in America for the first time. In the Timeline 10/27/62 World the Beatles disappeared in the ruins of their home city Liverpool.
On 27th October 1962 – the night of the War – the Beatles were appearing live at the Hulme Hall in Birkenhead. Co-incidentally, it was also the night they gave their first radio interview, for Radio Clatterbridge a station broadcasting to two local hospitals. The Beatles had not yet ‘happened’. Beatlemania was still some months away in early 1963. It was only three weeks after the release of the band’s first single ‘Love me Do’ and even locally on Merseyside, at that time the Beatles were hardly known to the general public beyond the circle of the regulars at the Cavern Club and other small venues in the area.
The Cuban Missiles War snuffed out the Beatles as it did the contemporary ‘London scene’; and there was to be no ‘swinging sixties’.
I think drama, literature and much of what we might call ‘art’ is about ‘what if?’ Human kind expresses its sentience through imagination, and in daring to dream impossible things. But from whence this imagination and will to dream comes I do not know.
However, I think – it would be overstating it to claim ‘I know’ – more or less from which well of imagination that Timeline 10/27/62 springs.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realized my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in the daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but didn’t know until much later that the most important moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of the United States of America. I didn’t know then that he was a womanising, drug addicted and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency, but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta - hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships - had been gunned down that day in Dallas.
The Cuban Missiles crisis and the death of a President taught a young boy in England in 1962 and 1963 that the World is a very dangerous place.
Subsequently, we have learned how close we all came to the abyss in October 1962, and on occasions since, and can look back on how deeply Jack Kennedy’s death scarred hearts and minds in the years after his assassination.
There is no certainty, no one profound insight into what ‘might have happened’ had the Cold War turned Hot in the fall of 1962, or if JFK had survived that day in Dallas. History is not a systematic, explicable march from one event to another that inevitably reaches some readily predictable point. History only works that way in hindsight; very little is obvious to the major or the minor players at the time history is actually being made. One does not have to be a fully paid up chaos theoretician to know that apparently inconsequential small events can have massive unforeseen and unforeseeable impacts in subsequent historical developments.
I do not pretend to know what would have happened if the USA and the USSR had gone to war over Cuba in October 1962. One imagines this scenario has been the object of countless staff college war games in America and elsewhere in the intervening fifty-three years; I suspect that few of those war games would have played out the way the participants expected, and that no two games would have resolved themselves in exactly the same way as any other. That is the beauty and the fascination of historical counterfactuals, or as those of us who make no pretence at being emeritus professors of history say, alternative history.
Nobody can claim ‘this is the way it would have been’ after the Cuban Missiles Crisis ‘went wrong’. This author only speculates that the Timeline 10/27/62 Series reflects one of the many ways ‘things might have gone’ in the aftermath of Armageddon.
The thing one can be reasonably confident about is that if the Cuban Missiles Crisis had turned into a shooting war the World in which we live today would, probably, not be the one with which we are familiar.
A work of fiction is a journey of imagination. I hope it does not sound corny but I am genuinely a little humbled by the number of people who have already bought into what I am trying to do with Timeline 10/27/62.
Like any author, this author would prefer everybody to enjoy his books – if I disappoint, I am truly sorry – but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. I really do believe that civilization depends on people like you.
Other Books by James Philip
The Timeline 10/27/62 World
The Timeline 10/27/62 - Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
(Available 1st June 2017)
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 - USA
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 – Australia
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
(Available 20th December 2017)
Book 2: Operation Manna
(Available 20th December 2017)
Other Series and Novels
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The Guy Winter Mysteries
Prologue: Winter’s Pearl
Book 1: Winter’s War
Book 2: Winter’s Revenge
Book 3: Winter’s Exile
Book 4: Winter’s Return
Book 5: Winter’s Spy
(Available 31st January 2017)
The Bomber War Series
Book 1: Until the Night
Book 2: The Painter
(Available 31st March 2017)
Book 3: The Cloud Walkers
(Available 31st March 2017)
Until the Night Series
Part 1: Main Force Country – September 1943
Part 2: The Road to Berlin – October 1943
Part 3: The Big City – November 1943
Part 4: When Winter Comes – December 1943
Part 5: After Midnight – January 1944
The Harry Waters Series
Book 1: Islands of No Return
Book 2: Heroes
Book 3: Brothers in Arms
The Frankie Ransom Series
Book 1: A Ransom for Two Roses
Book 2: The Plains of Waterloo
Book 3: The Nantucket Sleighride
The Strangers Bureau Series
Book 1: Interlopers
Book 2: Pictures of Lily
Audio Books of the following Titles