Just a Shot Away

by Saul Austerlitz

  A scramble was on for a replacement site. That Wednesday, three days before the concert, a man named Craig Murray called with an incredible offer: he had a huge, well-located site that he wanted to donate for the concert, free of charge. Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, some thirty miles from Golden Gate Park, had room for one hundred thousand cars to park—more than the total number of expected attendees. All the band would have to do was acquire health and safety permits, hire additional security, and pay for any damages. The Stones and Murray also agreed that the band would donate any profits from the show’s film and recording rights to a fund for Vietnamese orphans. Jo Bergman, who had gone out to California together with Sam Cutler to organize the show, recommended Sears Point to the Stones as ideal for their needs.

  The word had gone out via the media that the Sears Point show was on, but with only a few days until the first set would be played, little had been done to prepare the site for the influx of concertgoers—now estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Chip Monck began moving equipment there, and teams of volunteers deployed to assist in the task of creating a concert site out of nothingness.

  Then Craig Murray’s backers added a last-minute, poison-pill rider to the agreement: they wanted sole control of the rights to distribute the documentary film the band planned to release, or an upfront payment of $100,000. They also wanted $100,000 held in escrow to cover any potential damages to the site. The real Sears Point owners turned out to be a company called Filmways. The Stones had stiffed a Filmways subsidiary out of a lucrative second show at the Forum in Los Angeles in November. A Sears Point show, and the attendant film rights, could reimburse Filmways for the loss.

  Schneider bluntly told the Filmways representatives to go fuck themselves, and the unexpected saviors of the Bay Area free show departed as suddenly as they had appeared. A concert being promoted in the press and hyped on local radio for that Saturday now had nowhere to go. Unexpected good fortune had already provided a new last-minute concert location. The odds of it happening again? Cutler expected that the concert would be canceled; Schneider, fearful of the haphazard planning, hoped it would be.

  Maysles associate Stan Goldstein, prompted by Schneider, called and pleaded with local legal celebrity Melvin Belli (whose number had been passed along to Jagger by Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner) to save the day for the Stones. “All you have to do is help us find a venue,” Maysles producer Porter Bibb told Belli, “and you will be the hero of San Francisco and rock ’n’ roll.” The Stones advanced some money to cover Belli’s fees, and he agreed to pitch in. As providence would have it, another phone call came in, this time from a local racetrack executive named Dick Carter. In search of publicity for his struggling business, Carter invited the Stones to hold the concert at his site in eastern Alameda County.

  Cutler, sitting in the Grateful Dead’s Marin County offices, chartered a helicopter to look at the potential third site. He sent Monck, who had already scouted Sears Point, together with Rock Scully and Woodstock producer Michael Lang. After a quick flyover of the site, they all agreed: a concert would be challenging, but ultimately feasible. Monck reluctantly agreed, but the first impressions he noted were hardly encouraging. It was a bit trashy, he thought. A mildly inclined bowl with a three-foot stage at the bottom of it, and no barrier, would mean that all the audience pressure would be pointed at the stage, with nothing in the way of protection. There would be no time to build a new stage, or do much at all in the way of advance preparation. The name of the new site was the Altamont Speedway.

  2. Burning Crosses

  Years later, Dixie Ward would remember the bags of food her family lugged onto the train that brought her to California. It was 1944, and black soldiers were invading Normandy and fighting the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, but in San Angelo, Texas, to be black was to be second-class. African-Americans had been freed from slavery more than eighty years prior, but were still enshrined in Southern law as less than full citizens, kept in a permanent twilight of cruel and capricious treatment. To live under Jim Crow was to never know when you crossed an invisible line separating the deferential from the potentially catastrophic.

  Jim Crow said Dixie’s family could not vote or attend white schools, and also said that restaurants and shops could refuse to serve them. African-American families like Dixie’s rode in segregated train cars if they rode at all, assured only of lesser service and not guaranteed any of the comforts promised to other passengers. And so the bags of food ensured that two-year-old Dixie, her older brother Donald, and their mother Altha Anderson would be able to eat on the journey to California. Easily procured food was a luxury only promised to those whose skin was the right color.

  San Angelo was waves of heat shimmering on the hot summer tar, and red ants crawling through shotgun shacks. It was a community of shared struggle, of the kindness engendered by the cruelty of others, but the lure of the westward-bound train offered the promise of an escape from Jim Crow. There were parts of the country where black men and women could prosper, could stand upright, no longer forced to cower before the men who called themselves masters. There was a place called California where all things were possible.

  California beckoned for Altha in the form of her sisters Tommie and Claudia, both already living in the Bay Area. Tommie owned a tumbledown restaurant in Oakland. When black performers like Sarah Vaughan came to town, they often stayed at Tommie’s, barred as they were from white hotels. Claudia had a hair salon in San Francisco that welcomed celebrities like Billie Holiday who were looking to have their hair fixed by an experienced hand.

  Altha, Donald, and Dixie came to town while the war still raged, and rented an apartment in Berkeley, at the corner of Ashby and Harper Streets. They sought to remake themselves as Californians—as Americans, no longer subject to the violent injustices of Jim Crow. But not all of life’s problems could be erased by a change of location.

  Altha, like her sisters, was a beautiful woman. In one photograph from the era, she is sitting on a bar stool, half-turned to face the camera, her luxurious curls tumbling over her ears and onto her forehead, dressed in a striking off-the-shoulder dress, earrings sparkling in her ears. She holds a sweating glass in her left hand, and her eyes have swiveled to their corners to take in the photographer. She is alluring, but the set of her mouth speaks to struggles that no smile could offset.

  By the time Dixie was old enough to attend school, she would sometimes come home in the afternoon and find her mother catatonic, lying immobile on her bed. Altha’s body was an empty vessel, temporarily bereft of a host. And when Altha would return to herself, it would sometimes be worse. She would hear voices, see presences no one else could make out. Her words would come out in a tangle of disjointed phrases, jumbled together into a lexically indistinguishable morass.

  By the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists already knew to call what Altha was suffering from schizophrenia, but if you were black and schizophrenic, there was little hope of fruitful treatment. White doctors had little interest in helping African-Americans struggling with mental illness, and many blacks, perhaps preemptively anticipating the shame of being denied treatment, preferred to avoid all encounters with mental health professionals. Altha self-medicated, drinking herself into oblivion in the hopes of drowning out the terrifying voices that plagued her.

  Schizophrenics were treated like outcasts, doomed to an existence on the margins of an already marginalized group. Few people with steady jobs and stable families wanted to socialize with the likes of Altha, so Altha found companionship among those who would accept her. Physical beauty and mental illness were a toxic combination, attracting the interest of men who did not have Altha’s best interests at heart. A steady string of boyfriends came into Altha’s life, taking all that they could.

  Altha’s struggles with her health made it difficult for her to hold down a job, and the family would regularly move from one apartment to another, dragging their few possessions with them on another short jau
nt to their next temporary home. They would live in four different apartments on the 2900 block of Ellis Street alone, but 2942 Ellis would stick out most prominently in Dixie’s mind. The back apartment was no bigger than twelve feet by fifteen feet. It had no electricity, and a tiny refrigerator was crammed into the undersized kitchen. Rats crawled out of the walls with impunity, no longer fearful of human contact after so many encounters. There was no heat at 2942 Ellis, just a gas-burning kerosene stove, and Altha and the rest of the family would crowd around it, sitting in a semicircle around its mouth while trying to summon warmth from its belly.

  Meredith Hunter as a child, early 1950s. (Courtesy of Dixie Ward)

  Altha came home one night with a man named Curley Hunter, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. He wound up moving in to the family’s apartment. Curley, Dixie believed, was a bad omen for the family, for reasons she could not yet articulate. When Dixie was eight years old, in 1951, Altha gave birth to her son with Hunter. She named him Meredith. Ellis Street was a harsh and unforgiving home, and Altha was besieged by her own demons, but Meredith Hunter was loved from the moment he was born. Curley left soon after the birth of Meredith’s sister Gwen in 1952. Meredith would never know much else about his father.

  The family custom was to avoid the evil eye by not acquiring clothing or furniture for the new baby until he was safely at home. When Meredith arrived, neighbors came by with piles of clothes for the newborn, and Tommie and Claudia brought the blankets they had sewn for him. Altha took a banana box, painted it yellow and placed colorful decals all around its exterior to form a bassinet for the baby. She lined the new makeshift crib with sheets and her sisters’ new blankets before placing the baby to sleep inside.

  In her more lucid moments, Altha was an amateur poet and an enthusiastic believer in education. Her children would surpass and exceed her, she hoped, and their schooling would lift them to places far beyond San Angelo, far beyond the Berkeley streets. But children needed stability, and the chance to dream of the future, and Altha could not provide that.

  * * *

  Altha had given birth to Meredith, but the work of caring for him fell mostly to Dixie. By the time she was eleven, Dixie understood that it would be her responsibility to look after her younger siblings, three-year-old Meredith and two-year-old Gwen. She was her mother’s mother, and she never questioned it. It was her job, and she did it ably and diligently, even though Altha would regularly lash out, taking out her frustration over her own failures on the daughter who took her place. And the community was always there, too, helping in ways acknowledged and unacknowledged. If she needed to be somewhere, there would always be another woman who would take the children in for a few hours. And even when Dixie and her siblings broke the rules, the community looked on forgivingly. They would steal into their neighbors’ yards and make off with apples from their fruit trees, amazed by their own daring. Only years later did Dixie realize the neighbors had left bags out by the trees, silently endorsing and encouraging their raids.

  The children often went hungry. Altha was rarely around, and Dixie could only do so much with little money and two younger siblings to watch. A Safeway supermarket nearby regularly threw away perfectly good fruit and vegetables and bread. When the hunger pangs grew strong enough, Dixie and Meredith would walk over to the store and dumpster dive. Dixie would have to crawl in, surrounded by moldering lettuce and rotting eggs, and carefully pick through the detritus for salvageable food. Poverty was a constant humiliation, stripping you of your pride and your dignity, and then doing it over and over, each time your stomach grumbled.

  Around this time, Altha got involved with a man named Ray. Schizophrenia was an unforgiving master, one that encouraged its sufferers to seek relief from anything that promised a temporary respite from its hammerlock on the mind. Ray was a savior, at first, offering an escape from the terrors of the ordinary. Altha took the drugs Ray brought her to ease her pain, finding solace in the temporary balms he offered.

  Ray soon turned the still-striking Altha out on the streets, forcing her to turn tricks. He would beat her when she got out of line, or refused to cooperate, or when the drugs and the drinking were not enough to keep her battered brain from balking at an unmanageable reality. Instead of being treated with medication, or cared for in a clinic, Altha was out on the streets, day after day and night after night, selling her body to strangers for money. None of the men knew of her illness, or cared much so long as it did not interfere with their hasty pleasure. Her problems were her own, and none of their affair. The men in Altha’s life abused her—both the ones who professed to care for her, and the ones who came in search of their own gratification. A life lived at the mercy of others had its horrors imprinted on her body. Her ear was torn off, and one of her fingers rendered forever unusable.

  How does a child grow when surrounded by terrors he can hardly understand? Dixie, a surrogate mother while still herself a child, tried to give Meredith a routine, a comforting presence in the midst of so much uncertainty. She would make sure his meals were prepared, his clothes clean, his bed made. She would make sure he got to school on time each day. School was a comfort, an escape as certain as Altha’s and far less injurious. Like his mother, Meredith liked to create. He would write and paint, picking up the tools that would lead him to the words and the images that expressed his truth. At school he could be himself, but the school day always ended, and then he had to return home.

  The family’s new home on Sixty-third Street, with four people crammed into a one-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen facing the back, was too small to allow Meredith much room to play, or to dream. The outdoors offered an escape. Meredith would take the bike his aunt Tommie had given him and pedal it into the Berkeley hills, or to Tilden Park, nestled between the hills and the San Pablo Ridge. Dixie was a city girl, who once mistook a sheep for a particularly overgrown and hirsute dog, but her younger brother loved animals and insects of all kinds, likely seeing in their frailty and helplessness an analogue to his own. He would come home laden with specimens, seeking to rescue them, over Altha’s objections about an already full house.

  One day, Meredith brought home a stray dog he had fallen in love with on one of his bike rides. Altha flat-out refused to let it in the house, concerned that her furniture would be ruined by a dog intent on marking his territory, and Meredith fetched a stick, ready to neuter it with whatever was close to hand. It was less an act of cruelty than an ill-formed attempt at kindness toward a creature in need. Meredith, so helpless, wanted to find, like Dixie, a sense of strength through caring for others. There was always someone more in need of help than you, someone who could benefit from being looked after.

  Perhaps even then Meredith similarly dreamed of being rescued, of being swept away from this house of unnatural quiet and unpredictable menace to somewhere where childhood was protected, cared for like a butterfly collector cradling a prized specimen. Dixie did all she could for him, more of a mother to him than his own mother ever was or could be, but there were limits to how much protection a teenage girl could offer. There was school for Dixie, too, and a life of her own to live.

  When Altha wasn’t in Ray’s grip, walking the streets, she attended the Holiness church across the street from Dixie and Meredith’s school. Holiness churches strictly banned drinking and card-playing, but they also held out the possibility of Jesus’s perfect love, in which the reborn Christian could purify herself of all past transgressions, and scrub away original sin itself. Even while away at school, her mother’s pain, her desperate desire for healing, made itself audible. Dixie could sometimes hear the congregation’s prayers drift across the street while she sat in her classroom. The church must have called to Altha as a suggestion of solace in a life so drastically short of it. Suffering from a disease she did not understand, and beset by lovers who loved nothing about her, the church might have been seen as God offering his outstretched hand, telling her that all the sins prompted by a life of privation and pain could be scou
red away.

  Dixie and Meredith would occasionally pick up their mother’s Bible and read through it, intrigued without ever being remotely as moved as Altha was. They would unpack and unravel the stories, and wonder whether this cruel world could really be capable of such all-encompassing salvation. They would quiz Altha intently about her newfound faith, and she would look hard at them, unblinking. “I’ll pray for you,” she would tell them firmly, sensing their partially stifled skepticism. Perhaps Altha did not want to engage with her children’s biblical critique because some part of her knew their cynicism was well founded.

  The Holiness church ultimately provided her little comfort, little balm for her suppurating wounds. It was another all-encompassing hard sell, another demonstration of wares that could not reach her most hidden places. The church was near to a cult, a physically and emotionally demanding congregation that required regular attendance at evening and weekend services. Altha may have been saving her soul, but for her children, the results were much the same. Whenever she was not absent and out on the streets, she was absent and in church, calling to God instead of Ray.

  Soon Ray was coming around at home, too, a steady fixture at their apartment. He would look at the teenage Dixie a glance too long, stealing glimpses out of the corner of his eye. By Dixie’s own estimation, she was not half as beautiful as her mother or aunts, but she could feel Ray getting too friendly with her. Ray kept watching Dixie with the same calculating eye he had cast on her mother. Dixie worried that she would find him sneaking into her bed one night. She could see herself easily sliding into the same morass of prostitution and violence that her mother had, and it terrified her. Would Ray put her out on the streets, too? Altha, no longer able or willing to protect herself, still looked out for Dixie. She gave Dixie a gun, and told her that if Ray ever approached her, she should kill him. Dixie was sixteen years old.