At Canaan's Edge (19 page)

At the next rest stop, dissent greeted Andrew Young's announcement that lines must pare down to comply with Judge Johnson's limit of three hundred. Nonselected teenagers protested that it should be a Negro march to reflect their long record of sacrifices in Selma. A white woman agreed, and Young was obliged to compose a mini-sermon on two points: first, that whites offered practical protection as lightning rods for attention, second, that it would be unprincipled to exclude them. As he did, Ivanhoe Donaldson and the marshals culled their chosen Negro veterans by county: 157 from Dallas (Selma), eighty-nine from Perry (home of Jimmie Lee Jackson), twenty-one from Wilcox, fifteen from Marengo. There were none from Lowndes. Beyond the few outsiders already designated, such as Episcopalian “Goldy” Sherrill, Hosea Williams compacted a final category of “Dr. King's Special Guests” to ten, including Harris Wofford and an aide to U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. Buses returned to Selma with some hundred people—exhilarated, resentful, relieved, some vowing to be back—from the spot where Highway 80 narrowed to two lanes for twenty-two miles through Lowndes County.

“Pick it up, now!” shouted King. FBI agents counted 308 marchers, twenty-two of them white. Califano's “Report No. 2 as of 1400” told McNamara and Katzenbach that one-third were female, and noted the late arrival of SNCC's John Lewis among columns that moved three abreast over Big Swamp Creek on a narrow ribbon of land, through “opaque waters dotted with lily pads and floating algae,” wrote Charles Fager, “dead trees standing with the bark gone and the wood weathered smooth, long strands of gray moss fluttering,” then gently back up into dry and lonely square miles of scrub pasture, barely green.

Openness made the sun unexpectedly cruel, so that 250 of the marchers needed medical treatment by nightfall for sunburn and heatstroke. King removed his green marching hat with earflaps and placed it on John Lewis, saying he needed to protect his shaved head wound from Bloody Sunday. Negro teenagers wrote “VOTE” on their foreheads with thick white sun cream. Sister Mary Leoline of Kansas City, the only nun to walk the whole way, wilted inside a layered habit with a starched wimple that framed her round face, puffy and burned severely red. Jim Leatherer, a settlement house worker from Saginaw, Michigan, hopped on one leg with crutches, hands and armpits raw, lips cracked from the sun. Freed of Selma's street hecklers, who had mocked him with a parade cadence of “Left, left, left,” he disclosed miles along that he sometimes challenged female companions not to be put off by his fleshy right stump, causing Worth Long of SNCC to howl with semi-feigned indignation that white men stooped to guilt hustling, which was controversial within the movement as applied to white women. Leatherer said he was a democrat. Bevel and others coerced him into the medical van for spells of rest, but marshal Soracco chased weary dawdlers off a latrine truck as bad for morale. An itinerant local preacher of seventy-two years urged the teenagers forward, asking why they needed five days to go fifty-four miles. “I'm used to walking,” he said with bravado. “I could do it in a day and a half.”

B
YSTANDERS IN
the landscape were scarce until the columns approached the invisible hamlet of Trickem Fork. From the shade of two oak trees that rose on the horizon, a score of Negroes moved to the center of Highway 80, having waited four hours. Will Jackson, seventy-five, unaccountably left the door of his prized pickup standing wide open to peer intently back toward Selma. Twenty-two years earlier, he had stood numb near the courthouse lawn in Hayneville as his young daughter Mary Lee wrestled to the ground and choked a wealthy white farmer for putting his arm around her again. With former Sheriff Woodruff refusing the farmer's pleas for help, saying he had brought the scrap on himself, Mary Lee Jackson had won scars of lifelong conflict—proudly vindicating family lessons never to run from a fight of honor, but fleeing permanently for Detroit within days, sadly aware what it would cost her father and brothers to defend her in Lowndes County. Her mother, Mary Jane, who had wailed through the public commotion, now absorbed as revelation the slowly advancing host of helicopters, jeeps, marchers, trucks, soldiers, medical vans, and reporters. “Lordy!” she cried. “I didn't ever thought I'd seen anythin' like this!”

Mattie Lee Moorer threw her arms around King's neck, singing a biblical hymn of ancestors about “numbers no man can know.” She later recalled that he “got right in with it” on the music, but complained that “the ladies took Dr. King away from me.” The elderly swirled about—Mattie Ruth Mallard, Will Jackson's brother Gully, and Lula May, among “1800s people” born in the last century—and barefoot children scampered from the trees to be part of the excitement.

“I done kissed him!” cried one of the older women, in tears.

“Who? Who you done kissed?” shouted others.

“The Martin Luther King,” said Juanita Huggins. “I done kissed the Martin Luther King!” A strong singer, Huggins launched a new song: “Lord, I Cannot Stay on This Highway by Myself.”

Andrew Young tried to keep the columns moving past the knot of emotion. “Look at that!” he called out, asking reporters to notice the broken windows and missing roof shingles of Mt. Gillard Missionary Baptist Church, just off the highway. “That's why we're marching.” Young urged the Lowndes County residents to keep seeking the vote. While some reporters tried to interview them on the road, others who lingered to inspect the church discovered to their amazement that the unmarked shack nearby on brick stilts was the functioning public school for Negroes, Rolen Elementary, with an outhouse, rusty corrugated roof, rotted steps, and patches of Alabama license plates nailed askew over holes in the floor. Jesse “Note” Favors told reporters he had helped plant the overhanging oak trees as a student in 1931, when the saplings “weren't no bigger 'round than my wrists.”

Coretta King joined the march late Monday from a concert in North Carolina, bringing newspaper accounts that she and King read side by side down the highway. LeRoy Collins fell alongside as mediator, bringing details of Governor Wallace's latest efforts to restrict the final rally in Montgomery. Near White Hall, more Lowndes County residents waved and even cheered the march. Napoleon Mays, a deacon at Mt. Gillard and distant relative of Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, joined the ranks with a small flock of nieces, nephews, and his own children. Frank Haralson hastened boldly from a pine tree to greet the columns head-on, extending his hand. Ralph Abernathy asked whether he had ever seen Martin Luther King.

“No, sir,” said Haralson.

“Well, you're shaking hands with him now,” said Abernathy. Haralson drew himself up into a wide-eyed stare.

“Will you march with us?” King asked gently.

“I'll walk one step, anyway,” Haralson replied. On his cane, which supported an imperfectly healed broken leg, he walked the last two and a half of Monday's sixteen miles to camp in a cow pasture infested with red ants. Workers from one of the volunteers committees poured kerosene on the mounds, and actor Pernell Roberts of the television show
Bonanza
helped raise the four tents. Rosie Steele, a seventy-eight-year-old widow, confided to a Negro reporter what had changed her mind about opening the property she had accumulated during World War II, “when prices was up” at her country store. Steele recalled “telling my daughter the other day” that to her, President Johnson had been “just another white Southerner when I heard him talking about Vietnam,” but then came the speech about Selma, “saying we had the right to vote, to march clear to Montgomery if we wanted to,” and she decided she could not refuse King's scouts. “If the president can take a stand,” said Steele, “I guess I can, too.”

After dark, a teenager sneaked under a tent flap and asked nervously how to start a youth movement like Selma's in Lowndes County. Some restless marchers sneaked the other way past military sentries to gather outside the country store. A convoy of eight white college students pulled up and got out of their cars, prompting security marshals, including a minister from New Jersey, to join the standoff. Asked what they wanted, one curious visitor said, “I don't know,” and an awkwardly honest conversation turned sour on the question of motive. Students from Tennessee and Georgia concluded that the march aimed for hatred, not freedom, saying they heard white families were firing their maids. A student from Alabama insisted that the male marchers were being paid $15 a day, and recited precise lightning gossip that one female marcher was hospitalized already with $1,500 in her pockets from sleeping with forty-one niggers. To incredulous requests for names and verification, he politely shrugged, “Well, actually, ma'am, she bled to death.”

King broke away twice from the Lowndes County bivouac. With Abernathy, he rode back to Jean Jackson's kitchen in Selma and soaked blistered feet in a tub. After returning to overnight at Steele's campsite, he excused himself to raise funds for the march by a quick charter flight to Cleveland. “Mr. Young is in charge until his return,” Califano's Pentagon “Report No. 6” advised in Washington, where President Johnson, back from Texas, watched the successful space launch of Gemini 3. Military control of the Alabama protection mission passed “at 0600” from Selma's Team Alpha to Team Bravo based in Montgomery, Califano noted, adding that early rains caused trouble with mud: “One latrine truck is still stuck but should be on the road shortly.”

At 10:25 Tuesday morning, the Lowndes County skies opened. “It hit with drops as big as quarters, pouring down on them with a great clap of sound,” wrote one journalist from a trail car, “and coming back off the blacktop and crushed-gravel highway in a spray as high as their knees.” Scattered white hecklers shouted from umbrellas that “a nigger won't stay out in the rain,” but the lines slowed only until the continuing deluge saturated clothes and bedrolls beyond worry. Teenagers picked up the cadence for an uninhibited wet march. “A few youngsters put on cornflakes boxes for hats,” reported the
New York Times.
“Their freedom songs rang out louder than ever.” An old minister added merriment with a spontaneous shouted prayer of thanks to “Reverend Abernickel” for leading the exodus by flood, even though Abernathy did not march in King's absence. Halfway to Montgomery, on request from John Doar through Pentagon channels, Guardsmen in splattered ponchos along the route obediently turned outward toward the countryside, acknowledging external rather than internal danger.

W
HILE MEETING
with the House leadership, President Johnson first deflected a call from columnist Drew Pearson. “Just tell him no—tell him I've got the Security Council right after…this is just the worst day of the year for me,” he whispered to the operator, but changed his mind to give Pearson a soft, off-the-record telephone monologue on Vietnam (“I can't send up a white flag”) that ran on for fifteen minutes and pushed him late for a photograph visit. To British foreign minister Michael Stewart and his arriving entourage, Johnson continued seamlessly that some people wanted him to “bomb the hell out of China,” some wanted him to run yellow, and Barry Goldwater, his defeated Republican opponent in 1964, wanted him to defoliate North Vietnam with nuclear bombs to “clear the brush where I can see” infiltrators on the trails. “Sometimes I just get all hunkered up like a jackass in a hailstorm,” Johnson told the nonplussed diplomats, veering between picaresque anecdote and masterful synopsis well into the appointed time for Stewart to deliver a luncheon speech elsewhere. “He is power sublimated, like Niagara Falls,” U.S. ambassador to England David K. E. Bruce recorded in his diary. “He read a long letter from an American soldier in Vietnam to his ‘Mom,' strongly supporting American policy…. The cameramen made their onslaught in two waves. Then the Foreign Minister was released, after ninety minutes of an experience he is never likely to forget.”

Johnson started a late lunch with Secretary McNamara as “Report No. 7” from the Pentagon tracked the Selma march across the turnoff to Hayneville. “It is still raining,” Califano advised. On cue from the carrier
Intrepid,
the President broke away to congratulate Gemini 3 astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young for completing three earth orbits in five hours to Atlantic Ocean splashdown only sixty miles off target. Shortly thereafter, as crews removed the immense bank of temporary cameras from the Oval Office, he received a decisive conference call from the House Speaker's caucus about legislative negotiations on the bill to create Medicare. “I think we've got you something,” reported committee chairman Wilbur Mills.

“Wonderful,” said Johnson. He reviewed the agreement by imaginary inquiry: “All right now, my doctor…he pumps my stomach out to see if I've got any ulcers…does he charge what he wants to?”

“No, he can't quite charge what he wants to,” replied the administration's chief negotiator, Wilbur Cohen. Medical bills would be routed through insurance companies—“somebody like Blue Shield”—in a compromise arrangement “to be sure the government wasn't regulating the fees directly.” Patients would pay a percentage of the costs.

“All right,” said Johnson. “That keeps your hypochondriacs out.” He cross-examined the negotiators on their mechanism to mollify the doctors and insurance companies without breaking the new Medicare budget, then pressed for a vote before each group mobilized against the shared revenue stream. “Now remember this,” he instructed Cohen. “Nine out of ten things I get in trouble on, is because they lay around…. It stinks, it's just like a dead cat on the door…. You either bury that cat or get some life in it.” He reminded House Speaker John McCormack of a saying by his predecessor, Sam Rayburn, that a finished committee report was a dead cat “stinkin' every day. And let's get it passed before they can get their letters in.” He spurred on Majority Leader Carl Albert, and promised Wilbur Mills to cover the projected costs without deficit, saying “four hundred million is not going to separate us friends when it's for health, when it's for sickness, because there's a greater demand, and I know it, for this bill than for all my other program put together…and it will last longer.” Johnson told Mills a soft Texas yarn while munching a bit of sandwich, then worked himself back up to his war cry: “And for God's sake, don't let the dead cat stand on your porch! Mr. Rayburn used to say they stunk and they stunk and they stunk.” Mills averred that his own method was to seize the voting majority, by which time the President was purring again. “I know where you learned it,” he said. “Let me talk to the Speaker.”