A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  From where I was positioned, on the side of the highway across the road from where Chestnut stood atop a flatbed truck, I observed that many members of the sheriff’s mounted posse did not appear to be fully controlling their horses. The animals seemed to be nervous, even delirious as they raised up on their hind hoofs and jerked their heads spastically while uttering loud seething sounds that were interrupted by the cursings of their riders, who pulled tightly on the reins while struggling to remain in the saddles. I know little about horsemanship, but I had seen the mounted police of New York controlling crowds of demonstrators on many occasions, and I was sure that what I was seeing here was a situation in disarray, either because the men had been assigned to rowdy horses they were unfamiliar with or because the horses themselves were reacting to the currents of bellicosity that their riders were transmitting to them down through the saddles. But the sheriff seemed not to notice, walking by himself away from the barricade toward the side of the road where I stood with other members of the media. He was wearing his tailored uniform and the cap with the gold-braided bill, and as he came nearer to us, swinging his billy club as he walked, I could see his broad face brighten and his eyes twinkle as the lights of many cameras flashed upon him.

  To my right was a television crew from NBC; to my left, a freelance photographer named Norris McNamara, who had driven over with me earlier in the scarlet red Chevrolet coupe that I had rented from Avis two days ago when I had flown into Montgomery. I would have preferred a less conspicuous vehicle, hoping to draw as little attention as possible in this place that I assumed had already had enough of out-of-towners who were here to highlight Selma’s discord, but the red coupe was the only car I could get. On this Sunday morning, I had parked it on a side street in the business district because the police had closed the bridge to motor traffic after learning about the march. And as I then walked across the ramp toward the highway with McNamara, hearing the insults that some young white men were directing toward us as newsmen—McNamara was wearing two or three cameras around his neck—I began to resent McNamara. I wondered why he had to walk around in this feverish city flaunting all those cameras. But I said nothing, and Sheriff Clark was clearly not offended when McNamara pushed in front of me and began snapping his picture. After the trooper with the bullhorn had issued his three-minute warning, the sheriff turned away from us and returned to the barricade near his posse and their jittery, foaming horses.

  Now the front rows of marchers, having reached the barricade, paused and stood silently for some seconds facing the lawmen, as if waiting for further instructions or some form of dialogue. But the sheriff and the chief officer of the state police just stared at them, and especially at John Lewis, who reacted by steadfastly exhibiting the same passive mode of defiance that he had shown at the courthouse. It was a posture devoid of provocation, leaning toward nonchalance. Meanwhile, the trooper with the bullhorn raised his left hand to glance at his watch. At least a minute remained before the end of the time limit. Behind him the other troopers and the posse were busily donning their gas masks, and about thirty seconds later, without any signal or order that I was aware of, they prematurely went into action by tossing the first of many gas canisters high in the air, out toward where the demonstrators were lined up—and suddenly, as people began to scream and scatter, the canisters exploded with gun-pop percussion on hitting the highway, emitting stinging swarms of smoke that soon enshrouded the black people and burned their eyes and sent them tumbling blindly backward in panic before they tried to get up quickly and distance themselves from the punishment of their onrushing uniformed attackers.

  The lawmen charged ahead on foot and horseback, swinging their clubs and cattle prods and rifle butts down upon every recoiling black figure they could vaguely see in the swirling masses of smoke. As I stood watching next to the camera-clicking McNamara, aghast and speechless while taking notes along the shoulder of the highway, I could hear rising out of the haze a few hundred feet away the howling cries and almost songlike sighs of black women, and the swearing and moaning of many men, and other sounds, too, that I had never heard before—namely, that of wooden clubs and rifle butts pounding with muted audibility the demonstrators’ clothes-covered flesh and at the same time nicking the rims of some of the lawmen’s steel-lined plastic helmets—clap, cluck, clop; clap, cluck, clop! I also heard the sounds of NBC’s three-man television crew standing in a grassy patch nearby recording the whole scene, soon to be spun around the world and come boomeranging back to Selma.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I shouted to McNamara, smelling gas and lifting my pocket handkerchief to my face. I wanted to follow the hundreds of fleeing marchers and their uniformed stalkers whom I now spotted through the smoke as they crossed over the bridge back to Selma, running in different directions along the waterfront and through the business district. Hoping I could easily relocate my car, I thought ahead to visiting Brown Chapel, and then the police station, in search of information about the extent of the injuries and the number of arrests, and perhaps I could get statements from the mayor, the sheriff, and some of the marchers and their organizers. Then I planned to drive to my hotel, the gilded old slave-built edifice in the center of town where many newsmen were staying, and begin writing my article. I would have to finish it by 6:00 p.m. in order to meet the Times deadline.

  As I now ran along the shoulder of the road toward the bridge with McNamara, thinking about how I might begin my story, I saw the highway littered with shoes, hats, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, toothbrushes, and other items abandoned by the marchers; there were also several prostrate bodies of black people on the roadside receiving medical assistance, and a single ambulance had just been waved across the ramp by a policeman—an ambulance whose passengers would include, I later learned, the bleeding and barely conscious John Lewis. I had not seen him get hit, but I would hear that he had been the first target, no doubt the primary target of Sheriff Clark and his henchmen.

  Relieved that my car had not been stolen or vandalized, I quickly unlocked the doors as McNamara, with his cameras swinging around his neck, ran to the other side. Black people were dashing through the sidewalks on both sides of us, sometimes disappearing into alleys, or ducking momentarily behind billboards or the fences and walls of residential buildings and stores, eluding the reconnoitering lawmen who galloped back and forth on their horses or cruised through the street in their patrol cars. After I had started up the engine and was slowly pulling out from the curb, I noticed that some of the white people who stood watching from their second-story windows and front porches were gesturing to get my attention, pointing toward the rear of my car. I then felt myself rocking from side to side and heard pounding along the car’s trunk and back fenders, and suddenly my door was pulled open by a stocky red-bearded white man in his thirties who was breathing heavily, kicking up his legs in a backward motion while holding on to the outside handle of the extended door of my slow-moving car.

  “Hey, nigger lovers,” he yelled in at McNamara and myself, “where you off to?” Before we could answer, two of his friends came running alongside to join him and grab onto the door, and one of them spat what I think was tobacco juice in my direction as they continued to rock the vehicle while I kept my hands on the steering wheel and inched ahead.

  “Hurry, give it gas!” McNamara whispered urgently, flapping forward the lapels of the bulky cotton jacket he wore, covering up his cameras. I thought of racing ahead and dragging this trio with me if they hung on, but it also seemed too risky at this moment in this turbulent place—me speeding through downtown Selma in a red coupe with three angry and possibly armed hooligans hanging on while the raging lawmen around us were hunting down black people in flight, I stopped the car completely but kept the motor idling, and then turned toward the three intruders, and it was then that I recognized them. I had seen them earlier standing behind me along the highway, near the drive-in restaurant; they had been in the forefront of the group of white men led by the heckler bra
ndishing the Confederate flag.

  “How’d you like it if we broke off yo’ fucking door?” one of them now asked me, a lean, glint-eyed individual in his early twenties wearing a baseball cap and showing a missing front tooth.

  “I hope you won’t do that,” I replied. “I rented this car in Montgomery.”

  “Then how’d you like it if we broke off yo’ fucking head?” asked the red-bearded older man who had spoken to me first.

  “I hope you won’t do that, either,” I said. I tried to speak in an even tone, not wanting to seem intimidated but also not wanting to stir up these people any more than they already were. They are probably halfdrunk, I thought. They spoke in a slurred manner and stood unsteadily, as if relying on the door to maintain their balance. If any of them let go of the door and headed toward me, I knew I would slam my foot on the gas pedal and take my chances. But they remained where they were, swinging and pulling upon the outstretched door and its fully extended hinges, holding on even as a Selma city police vehicle pulled up next to us.

  “Hey, you’re blocking the road,” an officer said to me from the open window of his vehicle. “Move that damned car of yours.…”

  “We’re trying to, Officer,” McNamara replied, leaning across me as he spoke in a loud voice, “but these guys are stopping us.”

  The policeman looked at the three men but said nothing. The red-bearded man was grinning at the cop in a way that told me they were acquainted. Then the bearded man and the two others slowly backed away from the door and, as if on cue, suddenly ran toward it and slammed it shut with their booted feet and the palms of their hands so forcefully that McNamara and I went reeling sideways, careening against each other on the other side of the car.

  “Now you can get your damned car out of here,” the police officer said.

  After I had readjusted myself behind the wheel and shifted into the driving gear, I began to move forward. As I pulled away, heading toward Brown Chapel, I heard the red-bearded men yelling after us, “We shoulda kicked yo’ ass. You come down here, you start all this trouble, and you don’t know shit about Alabama.…”

  14

  by Gay Talese

  Special to The New York Times

  SELMA, Ala., MARCH 7—The long line of Negroes walked slowly and silently to the main sidewalk of Selma’s business district on this quiet Sunday. There were 525 of them, walking two abreast, and they were headed for a small concrete bridge at the end of the street.…

  AFTER I HAD TYPED AND RETYPED MY ARTICLE, COMPLETING IT two minutes before the end of the deadline, I dictated it by telephone from my hotel room to one of the recording transcribers in the Times news department in New York, dissatisfied, as I so often was, with what I had written and wishing that there had been more time for me to interview more people, to rephrase my sentences and think of better words to describe what I had seen—even though, in a fully understood and enduring sense, I was not really sure what I had seen, beyond the sadism and suffering along the highway, which the television networks had made the most of, interrupting their prime-time Sunday-night programs to show film clips of the lawmen clubbing people amid the screaming and the excruciating smoke, scenes that were rebroadcast on the following day and throughout the week, prompting thousands of appalled white and black citizens from all parts of the nation to accept Dr. King’s invitation to visit Selma and accompany him on the next march, one that he likened to the pilgrimage of the ancient Israelites out of Egypt.

  With all respect for the magnetism of Dr. King, I believe that most of those people who came pouring into Alabama did so because they were horrified by what they had been shown on television and felt compelled to register their disapprobation and disgust personally. I also believe that these film clips from Selma, so starkly vivid in their depictions of inhumanity and so uncomplicatedly clear in their differentiation between good and evil—black angels and white devils engaged in five minutes of graphic interaction culminating a century of post-Reconstruction wrath—reaffirmed how persuasive television news reporting had become in projecting imagery and attitude in ways that could immediately mold and mobilize public opinion. Television’s influence was being discharged not only from Alabama but from all parts of the nation in 1965, a polemical year, in which advocates and detractors—appearing in television studios or in front of cameras on campuses and in the streets—debated such subjects as whether leading athletes should compete in South Africa while its government continued to practice apartheid, or whether First Amendment protection should be extended to the vociferous students of Berkeley’s Filthy Speech Movement, or whether the United States should withdraw its military forces from Vietnam. Whatever the topic, the television news shows strived to be succinct, pictorially graphic, and ingrained with whatever might induce people to stay tuned; and the newsmakers themselves (the people the news cameras focused upon) often performed for the cameras in order to accommodate the cameras’ need for visual expression and animation and their own need to be seen and heard on television and thus spread their message far and wide to the masses. It was not that television was slanting the news but that the newsmakers were slanting themselves to television, were falling to the ground as the police broke up their demonstrations and thereby forcing the police to drag them to patrol wagons, prolonging the scene for the cameras and illustrating at greater length their willingness to suffer for their cause.

  I had been reared within the perimeters of print journalism, and when television reporters first entered the field during my early years on the Times, they were scorned by my older colleagues as a breed of illegitimates who were embarrassing to the profession. They were said to be superficial in outlook, all surface and no substance; and save for such notable exceptions as Walter Cronkite (who had worked as a foreign correspondent during World War II for the United Press), the television anchormen and assignment editors lacked the training and experience to properly evaluate and to comprehensively communicate in a balanced and reliable manner the serious events of the day. The preeminent figures in American journalism when I joined the Times were men who augustly personified the power of the printed word. Among this group of individuals was the venerable syndicated columnist Walter Lippman, not a Times man, and also my elder colleague at the Times, James Reston, the paper’s Washington bureau chief and its top writer (and a man so famous that he was once the subject of the lead story in Time magazine, with his photo on the cover); in addition, there were at least half a dozen star nonfiction writers on the staff of The New Yorker whom I admired and whose articles I clipped and filed away as examples of journalism that was both literary and historically relevant.

  One article that I saved was a reprint of a piece that had totally occupied the editorial space of The New Yorker issue of August 31, 1946. It was an article by John Hersey entitled “Hiroshima,” and it described the devastation of the first atomic bomb from the viewpoint of six people in Japan who had survived the blast a year earlier. Hersey conducted hundreds of interviews with these survivors and other people in Japan and then produced a work of art that re-created for me the horror of that moment (8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945) in human terms so riveting and transcending as to soar beyond what I could imagine while viewing the film clips of the poisonous cloud mushrooming on the horizon.

  The New Yorker issue featuring Hersey’s article sold out hours after reaching the newsstands, and on four successive nights the American Broadcasting Company canceled its regular radio broadcasts so that “Hiroshima” could be read to millions of its listeners. I was thinking about that piece and its effect on the pretelevision public while I was on assignment in Selma, and I wondered what examples of great contemporary reportage in magazines and newspapers were currently being filed away by young students of nonfiction in this video age, when the television newsmen were zooming in and communicating to the home audience an intimate sense of being at the red-hot center of history. It was not that I was foreseeing the obsolescence of the print media due to the mobile cameras and
the more competitive initiatives of television newsmen, and I certainly could not conceive of a day when my own newspaper would no longer stand as America’s “paper of record”; moreover, I believed, and would continue to believe, that what the Times’s editors each day saw fit to print would be the dominant daily guide for the assignment editors at the networks. But at the same time, the general public was now receiving most of its breaking news from television, and this inveigling visual medium was to some degree heightening or altering or reflexively relating reality as it offered pictorial evidence of its existence, and it was impacting upon the public more immediately and dramatically than the print journalism I was practicing in Selma.