Nobody Said Amen copyright © 2012 Tracy Sugarman
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any
fashion, print, facsimile, or electronic, or by any method yet to be
developed, without express written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events
and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination
or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A Morris Jesup Book of the Westport Library, Westport, Connecticut
Published by PROSPECTA PRESS
P. O. Box 3131
Westport, CT 06880
(203) 454-4454
www.prospectapress.com
www.westportlibrary.org
Cover art by Tracy Sugarman
Cover design by Miggs Burroughs
Book design by Barbara Aronica-Buck
Print edition ISBN: 978-1-935212-95-9
E-book ISBN: 978-1-935212-85-0
First edition November 2012
Printed in the United States of America
For Bette Keirn Lindsey,
Lake Lindsey, and
Charles McLaurin
Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Part Two
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Part Three
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
The cab left the bright neon of the highway from the airport and slowed sharply as it entered the darkened campus.
“You got a kid out here?”
The man in the back seat continued to peer into the darkness. “No,” he said.
“Place’s been deserted since graduation,” said the driver. “Last fare I had out here was two weeks ago.” He caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. “You sure of the address?”
Ted Mendelsohn checked Max’s notes. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
The car’s motor echoed against the silent college buildings as the cab moved slowly ahead behind its probing finger of light. At the rise of a small hill, he tapped the driver’s shoulder. “The hall should be right after the next turn. Let me off at the corner.”
The driver shrugged. “If you say so.”
As the car eased to a stop, two young black men with backpacks crossed from the darkness and trotted toward the single lighted building across the deserted green. The driver turned in his seat. “Not many people around. None of my business, but you sure you want to be out here?”
Mendelsohn watched the two slender figures as they loped into the bright entryway of the orientation building. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
But from the minute he entered the orientation building, he wasn’t so sure. He sensed he wasn’t welcome. As his eyes adjusted to the bright light he saw he was adrift in a sea of khaki and denim, backpacks, knapsacks, and duffle bags, and realized that he was not only the oldest person in the room but the most over-dressed. He heard the hiss of “fuzz,” then, “Watch it. FBI.” What the hell was he thinking when he’d packed for the flight? Christ, he was dressed like he was catching the 8:12 to Grand Central for a meeting with Max at Newsweek. He knew the room was watching and judging. A guy twice their age in a suit and a tie with a Valpack? Going to Mississippi to register black voters? Pissed with himself, he worked his way through the press of bodies and found an uncluttered seat against the wall. He loosened his tie, shed his jacket and stretched his legs, still stiff from the flight. A hell of a way to start, Mendelsohn. He watched the students, and beneath the ripples of laughter and sudden shouts of recognition, he sensed a stifled tension in the room, and it had nothing to do with him. The volunteers looked tentative themselves, doing what he was doing, taking the measure of strangers who would soon be more than strangers.
He got up and crossed to the desk to sign in with the woman from the Council of Churches, remembering meeting her at the New York office. Holmgren? Holstone? “Holstein,” she said with a grin. “Jean Holstein. Glad you could make it, Mr. Mendelsohn.” She checked her pad. “Journalist. Newsweek magazine. Right?”
“Guilty as charged.”
Her eyes drifted across the youthful faces in the chattering room. “Nice to have someone my age going with us, Mr. Mendelsohn.”
He tried not to smile and held out his hand, “At our age, Jean, I think you can call me Ted.”
A short, thin young Negro left a tight knot of blacks. He stood, seriously searching the throbbing hall before approaching the desk.
“Any word?”
Jean nodded. “A message for you, John. Mickey and Rita Schwerner just got in. They asked me to tell you to save them a beer.”
The somber young man nodded, smiling for the first time. “Thanks, Jean. That’s good news. We were hoping they’d make it out. They’ve been checking out the church fires, and they’ve had a rough time.” He nodded briefly to Mendelsohn and trotted to the small black caucus. “Mickey and Rita are here.” Each word seemed newly formed, perhaps a way to eliminate a stutter.
“Who are those kids, Jean?”
“SNCC kids, field workers from Mississippi. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The young guy is John Lewis. He’s in charge.” And that was how the orientation week started for him in Oxford, Ohio, June 1964.
Later, a long week later, one of the SNCC kids, Dennis Flanagan, told him: “It was the seersucker suit you were wearing, man! Everybody saw you thought FBI,” and grinned at the memory.
“No. It was the hat,” insisted Bobby Willis. “Definitely the hat. Nobody but FBI guys have worn hats since Kennedy gave them up.” So when Mendelsohn bought the table a round of beers they pounded the table, and when he announced his next trick, “the disappearance,” they hooted and watched appreciatively as he stepped on his Pana
ma straw hat and tossed it into the trash at the end of the bar. Bobby Willis said, “Nice, Pop.”
On Saturday he called Max at his home in Yonkers. And Max sounded like Max. “Jesus, Teddy, why did you wait all this time to call me? You couldn’t find a phone in Ohio?”
“I was adjusting, Max. Taking stock. Convincing the kids I’m not FBI.”
Max laughed. “You? FBI? Over J. Edgar’s dead body!” His voice dropped. “How’s it going?”
“It’s too soon to know. It’s a deserted campus in the middle of Ohio farm country. You can smell the hay in the fields and see the stars at night. And you can watch the kids, almost five hundred of them this week, white kids mostly.” He paused as a boisterous bunch of volunteers descended from the dining room. “I do. And they’re from everywhere, Max.”
“What about the reporters?”
“A few. AP. UPI. A stringer from the Washington Post. Not a story yet. Not going to be a problem.”
“And Negroes?”
“Mostly field workers from Mississippi. The SNCC kids. They may be our story.” A memory came unannounced. “You remember in ’44 when our outfit arrived in Plymouth, England, after the bombing? You and I were on our first liberty and we ran into a group of RAF pilots? Well, these SNCC kids remind me of them.”
Max said, “Talk to me.”
“They’re tough. They’re cool. They’re sinewy. They’re knowing. And they’re tired.”
“I remember. And?”
“And they’re glad these white kids have come to help. But they own the war they’ve been fighting. Like the RAF kids.” He wanted to find the right words. “And it’s not the white kids’ war because they haven’t been there. Can you remember that feeling in ’44?”
“Yes.”
“Then you remember. They loved each other. Not us. Same thing here. These white college kids are new troops, too shiny-new, maybe. But I can read the questions in the black kids’ eyes.”
“Like?”
“Like can these scrubbed kids make it through a summer in the Delta? Like can they really connect us to power in Washington? Can they find us bail money? Can we trust these strangers?”
Max cut in, irritated. “They don’t trust the students? Why the fuck not? They’ve come to help. What’s the problem?”
Ted hesitated. “It may not be a problem. The SNCC kids aren’t hostile, they want to trust them. But for a lot of them hope has been something that melts in your black hand. It’s going to take a lot of doing, in not much time. And it may be our story, Max.” He looked at the phone that connected him with the commonplace world he’d lived in, a world that was somehow receding. “It doesn’t feel like an Ohio campus, it feels like an arena in the middle of nowhere. It’s a scary space filled with images painted by black field workers who’ve been shot at for trying to register blacks so they can vote in America. They’re conjuring up a Mississippi the volunteers can’t even imagine, that I can’t imagine. The time’s hanging suspended, five days, four days, three days, two till we head for Mississippi. Christ, it feels like our countdown on the ship before D-Day, Max. We both sweated our balls off. I’m twenty years older than these kids and I’ve seen a hell of a lot more than they have, but I find I’m just one more white guy staring at a Mississippi that the blacks insist that I see.”
“You keep calling them kids,” Max said. “They’re not kids.”
“They look like my son, Richard. And they look like my daughter, Laurie. They’re kids to me.”
“That’s fine, Teddy’. Just don’t write it that way. Keep some distance. You’re working for Newsweek, not bucking for father of the year.”
Ted hung up the phone slowly, lingering on the time he’d conjured up of him and Max together—’43? ’44?—in England, and before that, at the midshipman school at Notre Dame. The sailor had told the new arrivals, “Follow me topside to the sixth deck,” and Ted had hoisted his duffle bag and followed the other new midshipmen to their quarters. At the end of the long corridor the sailor began to read the list of their new billets.
“McElroy, Frederick—billet 6A
McElwain, Jack—billet 6A
McKendrick, Alan—billet 6B
Mendelsohn, Theodore—billet 6B
Miller, Max—billet 6C
McCarthy. Brian—billet 6C.”
Before opening his door Ted looked at the short, wiry midshipman-behind him in the hall. He looked like a young Jimmy Cagney. “Are you Alan McKendrick, my new bunkmate?”
“I’m Max Miller. And you’re not Brian McCarthy, I’ll bet.”
“You’re right.” He held out his hand, laughing. “Ted Mendelsohn.”
So Miller, a reporter-on-leave “for the duration” from Newsweek, and Mendelsohn, the school newspaper editor at Chapel Hill, nurtured a special friendship. In the four months at midshipman school, they discovered a mutual appreciation for good writing, Chicago stride piano, South Bend girls on Saturday leaves, Robert Benchley, and good jazz. On the long bus ride back to South Bend from Chicago, where they had heard the Benny Goodman band on a Saturday leave, Ted lamented, “It took a Jew to hire Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson for a big band. But Goodman will never get a booking in my hometown of Atlanta.”
Max disagreed. “Nonsense. I’m Catholic, and I would have hired those guys. They’re the best in the business.”
“You’re a mixed breed, Miller. Doesn’t count. Only your old man was Jewish.”
Max grimaced. “He was also a prick who ran out on my mother and me. That’s why I got raised in the church.” He tapped Ted’s knee and looked quizzical. “Were you serious about Atlanta? Goodman’s the hottest swing band in the country. They could play anywhere.”
“Not with Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes. There’d be a riot. If you were born and raised there, you’d know it. And it’s not just Atlanta, Max. It’s the South. My family’s been there since Sherman burned the place. Believe me, I know.” He’d felt edgy and sad. “Being in that audience today, blacks, whites, it didn’t matter. We were just folks who wanted to hear great music.”
“How did your people get to Atlanta? Why Atlanta?”
“My great grandfather, Elijah Mendelsohnn, was a farmer, piss-poor, in Austria. He had a cousin who’d immigrated to Georgia and opened a pawnshop in Atlanta during Reconstruction. The cousin made money pawning rifles from the Union soldiers who were going home, and he told Elijah to come. And he came, with Grandma Sarah and two Guernsey breeding stock. He dropped the second “n” in Mendelsohnn to be more like a Yankee, and bought a small piece of land outside Atlanta. He started a tiny dairy that grew into Eli Dairy, a name that fit better on a milk wagon than Elijah. So for a hundred years there’s been an Eli Dairy.” He looked at Max. “The family expects me to run it after the war.”
“What are the odds of your doing it?”
Ted shook his head. “Same odds as you have for making Admiral.”
When they received their commissions as ensigns, USNR, Mendelsohn and Miller were assigned to train naval amphibious crews for the coming invasion of Europe. In the long, anxious days and nights preparing for D-Day in the English Channel they shared a longing for sleep, a desire to get the damn war behind them, and unsettling fears about what was waiting for them in Fortress Europe.
On D-Day they hit the invasion beaches together but saw each other only one more time before Ted was assigned to the Normandy beachhead and Miller got orders to return to his ship and proceed to New York to prepare for the invasion of Japan. From that point on, the friendship was nurtured by V-mails and letters.
One letter from Max caught up with Ted when he returned to England after the beachhead had been secured.
Teddy,
If you get to London again, look up Alex Hanson, an old buddy who’s working for Yank Magazine. I’m seeing his sister, Maggie, while my ship is in dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Terrific girl, Maggie. You’d like her. You ever coming home? It’ll be lonesome in the Pacific without you, pal.
<
br /> Max
After VJ-Day, Max was discharged and was eagerly embraced again by Newsweek magazine. When Ted’s discharge papers came through, he found himself adrift in London, hungry to see beyond the beachheads and liberated ports of Fortress Europe that had been his truncated world since D-Day. He wanted to explore Rome, visit Vienna, cross the Alps, and, after the ennui of his goddam beachhead, enjoy Paree! And he wanted to write about this new world, not the one of marketing milk in Atlanta. When he met with Alex Hanson at Yank magazine, his stars started to come into alignment.
Yank was beginning its final months of publication, and was trying desperately to find the reporters needed to tell the liberation story. Hanson enthusiastically introduced him to the managing editor, and Mendelsohn was taken aboard. For six months he wrote a column for Yank that he called “Kilroy Was Here,” vivid recollections from the sailors and soldiers who had liberated the beaches and braved the killing thickets and hedgerows of France. When Hanson sent the reportage to his new brother-in-law, Max, in New York, Ted received his first American assignment as a reporter.
Teddy,
When you’re done with Fleet Street, Newsweek can use you to tell our readers what our kids are leaving behind. Your word pictures are as graphic as Bill Mauldin’s drawings in Stars and Stripes. We’ll pay you a hundred bucks a column, once a month. Tell us what you find in what’s left of Hitler’s Europe. Your press card will be in the next mail.
Max
With the first paycheck from New York, Ted bought an English bike and began the personal exploration of Europe he had promised himself. Within 36 hours the tour was nearly aborted when he swerved into a canal trying to avoid a hurtling Red Ball truck convoy outside of Saint-Lô. He was scrambling out of the slimy water, hauling his wrecked bike, when the driver of the last truck in the 30-truck convoy saw him and wheeled the loaded truck off the rutted highway. The black GI leapt from the cab. “You okay?” He extended his hand and helped the bleeding and shaken Mendelsohn to his feet. “Good reflexes, man! I’ve seen worse slides into second base. You sure you’re all right?”
Ted wiped the muck from his face and stared at the wrecked bicycle. “I made second safe, but my bike was out by a mile.” With disgust he tossed the bike back down in the weeds and sank, exhausted, to the roadbed. “Thanks for the hand, Mac. You got a load to deliver. I don’t want to keep you.”
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