by John Lawton
‘You’re not fighting any individual. You’re not fighting any group of people. You’re not fighting any one man . . .’
Mel chipped in quick as a snake, ‘You are fightin’ the man.’
She could not help smiling at this. Mel wiped that from her face.
‘You are fightin’ Amerika.’
Could she hear that ‘k’? I could. She took back the high ground, standing over the two of us as we sat on the floor.
‘You are fightin’ the system! The white racist shoutin’ in your face is not your enemy. He is another victim. The system makes him what he is. The system is your enemy not the individual. The victory is not the defeat of any man, the victory is in justice being done.’
Mel’s attitude cost us.
The day before the first bus left Althea said to me, ‘Your friend ain’t ready.’
I knew exactly what she meant and played dumb.
‘He got too much aggression pent up inside a’ him.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘He’s a New Yorker. Kind of goes with the territory.’
‘No, Mr Raines, clichés won’t do. He ain’t gettin’ on that bus, nor the one after. Thing is. Are you on or off? Are you stayin’ with him or do you want to ride?’
Of course I wanted to ride.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘we both know what the non-violent movement stands for—we joined it with our eyes open. When it gets tough you can count on Mel.’
‘So what do you actually do?’
‘We advise on voter registration and on actions to secure voter registration. Mostly we write nagging letters to Bobby Kennedy.’
‘Where? Where do you do all this advisin’ an’ writin’? Here in Washington?’
‘Mostly, some in Atlanta, sometimes in Philadelphia.’
‘Philadelphia? That’s a long way from the front line, Mr Raines. Have either of you been out onto the back roads of Alabama or Mississippi?’
‘No.’
‘Then you don’t know you can count on your li’l buddy, and you ain’t gonna put him to the test till I say so. Now, I ask you again—you on or off?’
‘I could leave him, but we came into this together and we’ll see it through together.’
Two buses left without us.
It wasn’t long before the Freedom Ride saw first blood. A violent confrontation in Rock Falls, South Carolina. Only when it made the papers, not just our papers, but national papers, did I realise what we were into. Only America’s first man in space eclipsed what was happening to that first Freedom Ride—it was an opportune distraction. Certainly distracted me for a while—I had one thought leading off into tangents of memory, but starting with ‘Billy Raines, can you see this? Billy Raines, can you see this, wherever you are?’ Did he see the arc Alan Shepard cut through space?
Just outside of Anniston, Alabama the lead bus got firebombed—riders got hospitalised—and when the rest made it to Birmingham, the bus terminal turned into a near-massacre, riders beaten to the ground and not a cop to be seen. Then Montgomery became a place of siege, Martin Luther King all but barricaded into a church, surrounded by the national guard, an escort to the state line, and finally in the terminal at Jackson, Mississippi, an orderly procession right through the colored lounge, right through the whites only, into the paddy wagon, into the court and into the state penitentiary.
Things changed after Birmingham. CORE wanted to stop, SNCC to carry on. No justice in quitting. So SNCC took over from CORE with their blessing. The word went forth, the torch got passed to a new generation, blahdey blahdey blah—now they needed all the riders they could get and it mattered less what Althea Burke thought of Mel’s self-control.
Mel and I got picked to ride the bus back the other way—maybe we were the only people with the air fare?—New Orleans to Washington. I figured that gave us about five hours to make our statement to the world. In Jackson we would surely be locked up and thrown in the slammer, just like the others. But at least the threat of violence had receded. The world was watching, we would hardly get the chance to pass through Alabama, and the deal in Mississippi seemed to be tacit between the state and the federal government. The cops would protect us—but they had to lock us all up to do it. How convenient that Althea had defined victory for us before we set off. Just in case we couldn’t recognize it when it came.
We were paired off. Twelve of us. All men. Black with white. Mel with an Alabama kid as short and garrulous as he was himself. I could hear them, mile after mile, chatting, arguing, placing pointless bets on who would be the first to see what out of the window—two points for an Olds, five for a Caddy, lose five for a Ford, score ten for a truckload of beer—and me with a lean, dapper young lawyer from Boston, all neat in a black two-piece suit despite the rising June heat. Just a white lapel with ‘Freedom Now’ stamped on it to break the monotony. A quiet, perfectly self-contained man, Harlan Finch, who had learned a knack I never could, how to read on a moving bus without throwing up. We talked little. I slept a lot.
Some of us peaceniks relished the power of song—I have heard ‘We Shall Overcome’ sung more times than I could ever count, that or ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. Nobody sang on our bus. Maybe too many northerners. Too many men. Maybe nobody could sing. The only time I ever heard Mel sing it was an earplugs only version of ‘All Shook Up’. We pulled into Jackson Terminal in near-silence. Tensed for the bust that we all knew would swiftly follow. The door swung open. A cop leapt up the steps, nightstick out, yelling at the driver.
‘Y’cain’t stop here.’
‘I gots to piss. Mos’ likely they all gots to piss.’
The driver waved a hand towards the back of the bus, where we sat in pairs like pieces thoughtfully placed around a chessboard. It was as though the cop saw us for the first time.
‘Oh Jesus Christ. No.’
He pushed the driver back into his seat with the end of his stick. No real force, but the threat of it.
‘Drive on!’
I got up. Walked towards him.
‘Excuse me, sir. We all have tickets for Washington via Birmingham.’
The cop ignored me.
‘Drive on. We got two busloads of these beatnik Yankee militants backed up in there already. We’re running out of paddy-wagons. Drive on. I don’t care where you dump ’em so long as it’s outside city limits.’
He looked at me now.
‘Where do you people come from?’
He wasn’t talking geography. He leapt off, the door closed behind him. The driver slammed the bus into reverse. I lost my footing and fell to the floor. By the time I got up again he was spinning the bus around, jerking it through the gears and gathering speed.
I crawled to the front and tried to get him to pull over.
‘You wanna die for black folks that’s your choice. Me? I’d sooner live.’
I staggered down the swaying bus towards Harlan.
‘Does it matter where?’ he asked as I dropped beside him.
‘Does what matter?’
‘We came to ride desegregated or get arrested doing it. We will surely be arrested. Does it matter where?’
I didn’t answer. I watched the suburbs roll by, wondering when the driver might risk stopping for gas or a piss. Would we reach the Alabama line on reserve fuel with bursting bladders?
Forty miles on—I never did know where—the driver pulled onto a broken blacktop in front of two hand-cranked pumps that looked as though they had stood there since the discovery of gasoline. It was close to dusk. Evening cool. I looked around. Where we were was more of a pit stop than a town, with just two houses, the gas station, a Coke machine, and a store.
The driver got out of his seat.
‘I gots to refuel. If you gots to piss, then there’s cans round the back. I wouldn’t worry none about desegregatin�
�� ’em. They’ve been marked white and colored since God was a boy. You ain’t gonna change ’em now.’
I heard Mel say, ‘There’s nothing like a challenge.’
The driver opened the door and vanished into the falling darkness.
I stood in the aisle, Harlan behind me, Mel behind him. All hesitating. No one quite knowing why. Then Mel said, ‘What gives? We forgotten how to do it?’
I looked out. If there were toilets, they were round the back where I couldn’t see them, but I didn’t need to see them to know what was written on them and that we would burst before they let us in there. They seemed to me to have come out of nowhere. A dozen pickups had slewed all around us, we could neither go on nor go back. Then they gathered, a bunch of rednecks bristling with the self-righteousness of the poor white man who has nothing going for him but his belief in his superiority to the black man. They smiled. One guy slowly slapped a baseball bat into the palm of his hand. I have never understood why violence smiles as it waits for you. It must be a pleasure. Only conclusion I have ever been able to reach on it, but one I hardly grasp.
I had to get off the bus ahead of Mel. Whatever happened I did not want him to be the one to start it, but as I reached the door Harlan Finch stepped between me and the rail and said, ‘I should go first.’
I whispered my answer, ‘Harlan, these could be some mean customers. Let me go first. I speak their language.’
‘Time they learnt mine,’ Harlan said and stepped off the bus. Crossed the ground between us and the mob in a few long strides and despite what he had said to me stopped at a regulation passive-resistant, non-provocative distance, avoiding excessive eye contact, letting his body language, a term we knew not, say as much as it could about him being non-confrontational. He believed in that. I believed in that, all of it. I’d bought the whole package.
‘Gentlemen,’ was his first word in that corny Kennedy-esque accent of his. He never got out a second. One baseball-hatted bubba looked at the next, grinned like an idiot, said, ‘Now, what in hell do we have here? A nigger with a fancy twang in his voice?’ He leapt forward, punched Harlan in the face and Harlan went down under a rain of blows. They’d hit him six or seven times before I could get to him. One bubba stood with what I took to be a wooden beer crate raised over Harlan’s head when I shoved myself between them.
‘Please stop,’ I said. ‘He means you no harm and he can’t hurt you now he’s down.’
‘If ’n’ ere’s one thing I hate more ’n a uppitynigger it’s got to be a uppitynigger-lover.’
And he brought the crate down hard aiming for my head. I blocked him with a forearm, heard a bone crack in my left hand, and then I hit him with my right. The pathetic triumph of instinct over intellect. A force so visceral and blind, welled up from places of the heart I had never been before, so deep I could not feel the pain of my broken bones or my fist connect with his jaw. The last thing I can remember seeing was the Essolube logo on his cap as I decked him. The last thing I heard as they pounded me into the ground with that damn crate was Mel yelling ‘Turner, no!’
And I thought I was there to restrain him.
I woke. A hospital ward. Took me half a minute to remember where I was and why I’d come. Was it the jail ward, bars at the end of the line of beds? I turned my head to see and found I couldn’t. I was fixed in some way. Then I realised. My head was bolted to some sort of stabilizer, there was a cast on my left arm and my jaw was wired up. What the fuck? I slept some more.
When I came to again a near-silent doctor stripped the apparatus off my head, muttered something about a hair-line fracture and left me to suck sweet goo through a tube. I could look now—hurt like hell but could just about manage it. Yep—I was pretty sure I was in jail again. It did not yet occur to me to wonder where.
A bluish-skinned black man was pushing a broom three feet wide along the middle of the ward—gathering dust and fluff into a moraine ahead of him. He stopped by me, wheeled the line of dirt my way, leaned in to me.
‘You de guy got beat up out on the de highway?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So you’re whitey come to set all us niggers free?’
What could I say to that?
‘Where you f ’om?’
‘Tuxush.’
‘Texas! Whassmadder wit you, man? You know what you gonna do? You gonna get us all killt. Texas? Ain’t you got niggers o’yo’ own you could get killt in Texas ’stead o’ comin’ to Miss’ssipp?’
He pushed away, broomed out into the corridor and from down the ward I heard Harlan’s voice.
‘Well, Mr Raines, shall we do that? Shall we liberate Texas next?’
He laughed. I damn near pulled a muscle trying to turn my head and get a look at him. Had to be a jail ward—any civil hospital would have put Harlan in ‘Coloreds’. Until he spoke I’d thought I was there alone—alone of all the Freedom Riders.
Oh Althea Harris Burke—did you write the irony into those words yourself? Freedom to get every nigger in Mississippi killed and me along with them?
It must have been the third or fourth day when my fingertips found the scar at the back of my head. A shaved patch the size of a silver dollar, a small, scabby wound, as though it covered a hole. I tried asking what but nobody seemed willing to talk to me.
The day after that I woke to find Mel shaking me gently by the good arm.
‘Wake up, wake up, Turner. We have to go now.’
Mel was bruised and plastered with Band-Aids, and accompanied by a uniformed deputy sheriff.
‘Go? Go where? Are we on trial?’
I must have sounded like an idiot to Mel, but it seemed logical to me. We’d been busted. We were always going to get busted. We were in jail. We’d be put up in front of the bench, fined God knows what, the gavel would pound and we’d be driven to the edge of town and told to fuck off—or else we’d be bussed to the pen for sixty days. I’d heard it all before.
Mel helped me into my clothes. I caught a glimpse of Harlan dressing a few beds away from me, a bandage wrapping his head like a turban. He was quicker than me, came across and helped Mel thread my unruly legs into trousers. The deputy didn’t lift a finger, didn’t speak to us until we were in the back of a patrol car speeding out to an airfield.
I watched the streets of Jackson pass by in a blur. I tried the easy questions like where and why, uttered through teeth clenched shut with brass surgical wire.
‘We’re going home,’ Mel said softly, but he wouldn’t tell me why. I looked at Harlan, wedged between me and the door. I could see he knew no more than I did.
‘Did I miss the trial?’ I bleated, and the deputy twisted in his seat and said, ‘You got some powerful friends, boy. You jus’ got pulled from the fiery furnace of burnin’ hell. Don’t let it fool you. Y’don’t come back now. Y’don’t come back to Mississippi. Next time we’ll let ’em kill ya.’
They got me up the steps and into a plane. I was walking in the middle of a dream. I fell asleep again, and woke to find we were airborne and my senses somewhat clearer than they had been. I was still seated between Mel and Harlan, the bookends to stop me tumbling back into the dream.
‘Mel, what the fuck is going on?’
‘You fractured your skull.’
‘I know that.’
‘And you got a blood clot on the brain. They had to drill through your skull to let it out.’
My fingers found the scar again. I knew now why it felt so neat and round.
‘And?’
‘And I thought you were dying and I called your old man.’
‘You called my father?!’
Harlan chipped in quietly from the other side.
‘We had good reason, Turner. You did nearly die.’
‘You-called-my-father?’ I said emphasizing every word so hard I thought I’d che
w through the wire.
‘Had to,’ Mel replied.
I knew the rest. He didn’t need to tell me. The deputy’s words rang in my head now with all the sonorous clarity of meaning. Mel had called Sam. Sam had called LBJ, that ‘powerful friend’, and the Vice-President of the United States had called the sheriff of a one-horse town in Mississippi, told him how much he’d appreciate the charges being dropped against his ole friend Sam Raines’s boy and those two guys with him, and he’d found something the bastard wanted and horse-traded our freedom—Johnson was nothing if not the greatest horse-trader in Washington—and with it traded our dignity and our honor.
God, what a mess. What a way to end. I could not forgive Mel for this. I meant to get back on that bus as soon as I was fit, and when we stopped I meant to eat and drink in a desegregated diner and piss in a desegregated can and if I couldn’t I’d get arrested and stand trial. Good God, what had he done?
I passed a couple of weeks in hospital in Washington. Sam and Lois phoned. I had enough mental energy to convince them not to fly out. Harlan came and told me he was riding again. Washington to New Orleans that afternoon. Mel came. Surprisingly little to say. Most surprisingly of all, Althea Harris Burke came.
‘If you came to say I told you so, get it over with.’
‘OK. I told you so.’
‘You feel better for that?’
‘Whatever. I sure as hell bet I feel better ’n you.’
‘Not difficult,’ I said. ‘Miss Burke, what exactly is it you want?’
‘Do I have to want something?’
‘You want something. I can see it in your eyes.’
‘You have a great way with words, Mr Raines. Maybe I just came because I like you.’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘Maybe I came because I think you might be my kind of guy.’
Good fucking grief, was I blushing?
‘Miss Burke. There are things you don’t know.’
‘Sure. You lived twenty-something years. There’s lots I don’t know.’
‘I mean. Things about the Freedom Ride. You think Mel started that fight in Mississippi that got us all beat up, don’t you? It wasn’t Mel. I punched the lights out on some pork-bellied redneck. It was me.’