At Canaan's Edge (33 page)

“Well—”

“—and I know the terrible burden and awesome responsibility and decisions that you make, and I know it's complicated,” King rushed on, “and I didn't want to add to the burdens because I know they're very difficult.”

Johnson paused. “Well, you, you, you're very, uh, uh, helpful, and I appreciate it,” he said, stumbling. Then he recovered: “I
did
see it. I
was
distressed. I
do
want to talk to you.” He exposed to King his confessional tone about Vietnam, saying he had stalled and hoped to the point that “unless I bomb, they run me out right quick,” and stressed the constant toll of war pressure—“well, the Republican leader had a press conference this afternoon, [Gerald] Ford, demanded I bomb Hanoi”—over his twenty months in office. “I've lost about two hundred and sixty—our lives up to now,” he told King, “and I could lose two hundred and sixty-five
thousand
mighty easy, and I'm trying to keep those zeroes down.”

The President admitted that he was “not all wise” in matters of foreign policy. “I don't want to be a warmonger,” he assured King, but neither could he abide defeat in a Cold War conflict. “Now I don't want to pull down the flag and come home runnin' with my tail between my legs,” he said, “particularly if it's going to create more problems than I got out there—and it
would,
according to our best judges.” Johnson urged King to explore the alternatives at length with Rusk, McNamara, and himself—“I'll give you all I know”—and thanked him for constructive purpose always “in our dealings together.” King in turn thanked Johnson for true leadership, and especially—“I don't think I've had a chance”—for his speech after Selma. They parted with pledges of joint zeal to finish the quest for universal suffrage.

At their fleeting, crucial moment of contact on Vietnam, Johnson had minimized his war motive to the point of apology, just as King circumscribed his criticism. Each one said he yearned to find another way, but shied from nonviolent strategies in the glare of the military challenge.

T
HE SEMINARIAN
Jonathan Daniels reached Selma for a third stay on July 8, this time alone, having completed the semester at Cambridge by submitting overdue papers steeped in religious epiphany. Stark memories had become tools for reflection. He recalled first erasing the hostile stares of Southern strangers simply by switching from Massachusetts to Alabama license tags, with the “Heart of Dixie” state slogan, only to become flushed under the wary looks of Negroes, then mortified by the impression Upham's car advertised along roadways back north through his native New Hampshire. “I wanted to shout to them, ‘No, no! I'm
not
an Alabama white,” Daniels wrote. Yet he identified with white Southerners in turmoil against him, to the point of defending them from showers of condescension at the seminary. Regretting the “self-righteous insanities” of his early weeks in the Alabama Black Belt, he expressed gratitude to his pastoral mentor in Selma, Father Maurice Ouellet of St. Elizabeth's Edmundite mission among Negroes, for making clear exactly how “he had finally stopped hating” fellow white clergy after twelve years of ostracism and injustice. Daniels carried a secret intention to pursue conversion under Ouellet toward the Catholic rather than Episcopal priesthood. He found comfort in the formal liturgy and structured hierarchy of the Roman Church, which had anchored centuries of cerebral meditation from St. Augustine to Thomas Merton. From his own inner voyage in Alabama, treated variously as a “white nigger,” “redneck,” and oddball savior, Daniels stretched for an empathy that could reach all human wounds. “It meant absorbing their guilt as well,” he wrote of the segregationists, “and suffering the cost which they might not yet even know was there to be paid.” He professed new baptism to a living theology beyond fear—“that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”

Lonzy and Alice West drove Daniels from the Montgomery airport to apartment 313E at the Carver Homes in Selma, adjacent to Brown Chapel. Many of the ten West children at home squealed with delight over the return of their favorite family guest, even though they had to bunch more tightly on beds and sofas to vacate his old room. Daniels retained an open bond with them, particularly the younger ones. He had the wit to join in their fun about the novelty of himself as a white man in Carver Homes. He recognized them as participants in a fearful movement, but employed playful nonsense—bouncing them on his knee, twirling them in the air, asking, “Now are you afraid?”—to dispel hardships from the grown-up world.

Local powers were reasserting authority in the wake of Selma's great marches. Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Alabama had just banished Father Ouellet to Vermont by edict that made national news, depriving Daniels of personal counsel and the Wests of their family priest. (Lonzy West had converted from the Negro Baptist church a decade earlier, after a stint as Ouellet's parish janitor.) The Dallas County school superintendent aborted a tense first meeting with Negroes on freedom-of-choice integration by announcing that he would receive only written questions for later study, then refusing to address the Negro parents by courtesy titles rather than first names. In declining also to shake their hands, the superintendent stood curtly on the abstract principle of his free choice, but apologists said he could not survive the political stigma of breaking racial custom. Meanwhile, Mayor Joseph Smitherman stalled the downtown boycott of segregated merchants until it dwindled for lack of result.

Inside a fatigued Selma movement, there were complaints, about self-promotional leadership well before the July 6 embezzlement arrest of Rev. F. D. Reese. A close observer of the emergency perceived him as an amateur trapped between persecutors and opportunists. Ralph Abernathy flew in with an earthy appeal to unite behind Reese even if he was guilty. He ridiculed the idea that white officials, who arrested them for trying to vote, suddenly became trustworthy guardians of the movement's private collections. “I didn't see Mr. Baker put anything in the plate!” he cried. By exercising command of the pulpit—calling for treasured hymns, extolling preachers as inheritors of biblical leadership—Abernathy held off the criticism that bubbled in the pews. “The SNCC people here come on with their taunts about SCLC exploitation and abandonment,” one of King's staff members wrote, “and I know it isn't true, but I can't answer them.”

Beneath the leadership skirmishes, Daniels pitched himself into experimental projects such as the Selma Free College. Volunteers unpacked books from collection drives organized by spring marchers on their return to home cities—13,000 in the first shipment from students at San Francisco State University, 1,600 from Antioch College, small truckloads from Yale and Brown. To avoid repercussions in white Selma, officials of all-Negro Selma University fearfully declined to accept donations tainted by civil rights (sadly so, as the campus library held fewer than four thousand volumes), whereupon a dozen volunteers catalogued a full lending library for their own improvised summer curriculum. They scrounged a piano for music and folk dance, turned a derelict house into an art gallery, and held large swimming classes in a pond. They nailed wire mesh over windows to control vandalism by the “Green Street Gang” of young Negro boys, who stole supplies and killed mealworms meant to feed the lizards in a nature display assembled by science teacher Mary Alice McQuaid of Colorado State. More pleasantly, the Selma Free College managed overflow attendance in Gloria Larry's class. Students idolized her poised, movie-star looks, but Larry—a graduate student in comparative literature at Berkeley, who had made her way south with trepidation more than a year after hearing a Bob Moses talk—was nonplussed by the clamor for French lessons instead of demonstrations. Nine-year-old Rachel West eagerly joined her freedom class every morning. West's housemate Daniels, rejoicing to learn that the new teacher was a lifelong Negro Episcopalian, told Larry she had impeccable credentials to renew the campaign for integrated worship at St. Paul's Church.

Daniels resumed his awkward, daily overtures to St. Paul's members at their offices and homes. With members of Silas Norman's local SNCC staff, he also canvassed the poorest sections of East Selma. Households lacked basic nutrition and potable water, as was obvious from surveys taken in the Free College health class, but direct exposure to conditions in see-through shacks often shocked the volunteers. One woman, asked why no male supported her destitute family, placed her hand on the heads of eleven offspring as she recalled absentee fathers out loud. To a numb suggestion that she stop seeing such men in order to qualify for social services, the mother pleaded that children were more precious than a welfare check. Volunteers figured out how to pacify another mother who was too fearful of a doctor, or too distressed by the idea of venturing into white Selma, to accompany Daniels and her two small children to Good Samaritan for emergency treatment of malnutrition and intestinal worms by Dr. Isabel Dumont, a German refugee who had preceded and survived Father Ouellet at the Catholic mission.

Ouellet had feared that Daniels was too naive for such work. From their spring conversations after mass, he thought the seminarian believed too strongly in the power of ideas to reform character—that he could change Rev. Frank Mathews of St. Paul's by dialogue on Christian duty and theology, for instance, whereas Ouellet perceived Mathews to be governed by his coveted social post at Selma's most prestigious church. Now Daniels himself was becoming a relative veteran. He could laugh over poignant absurdities of race while expounding on the difference between foolishness and a childlike tenacity of faith. After one fresh volunteer from California tried to assure strangers that some Negro girls in question were all right because they were under his supervision, only to be chased from the white side of the laundromat by a woman beating him with her shoe, it was Daniels who helped turn the volunteer's fright to relieved hilarity, then to lessons on cultural provocation and risk. He became mentor also to a middle-aged couple who arrived from Long Island for a month's stay. He found them lodging with a nurse in Carver Homes, arranged for them to help teach a geography class, and took them to mass meetings at Brown Chapel, where Rabbi Harold Saperstein twice was asked to speak as a visiting dignitary. From his parallel experience, Daniels tempered disappointment when the Sapersteins were implored by uncomfortable local Jews not to attend services at the temple on Broad Street. He took them into East Selma. He coached them on everyday subtleties such as visits to the post office—how not to stand out more as civil rights workers by trying to hide—and rewarded their progress with an odd announcement: “I think it's all right for you to meet Stokely.”

Asked to wait outside a remote, primitive cabin, the Sapersteins first saw Carmichael step from the doorway behind Daniels with a roasted leg of small game. Marcia Saperstein guessed it was possum, her husband thought rabbit, but they were too disoriented to ask. Still rattled from the long drive out of Selma at speeds above eighty—“Never let a car pass you,” said Daniels, citing one of Carmichael's paradoxical safety rules—they were absorbing what Daniels told them of the rural SNCC outpost that had lasted four months in Lowndes County without electricity, money, running water, or protection from the Klan.

Maddening hope had seized the Freedom House cabin since July 6, when a Justice Department lawyer stunned Carmichael with notice that local officials agreed to add registration dates and to terminate literacy tests for prospective voters. Was there a trick, or perhaps some deal to mitigate future enforcement of federal law? After spirited debate, the Lowndes County movement resolved to gamble in trust. They appealed to five hundred pioneer applicants since March 1—nearly all of whom had been rejected—to brave another try at the Old Jail in Hayneville. Lillian McGill quit her federal job at the Agriculture Department to canvass nearly around the clock, often with John Hulett, the church deacon who had founded the Lowndes County voting rights movement since rescuing his pastor from the Klan in February. SNCC workers mobilized outside reinforcements including Gloria Larry, who, after morning classes in Selma, ventured out through Big Swamp to help shepherd registration caravans. (When the prim Larry first asked to use the Freedom House bathroom, she endured guffaws as Carmichael merrily pointed her toward the small outhouse in the woods behind.) There had been serious division also about Daniels. Most project workers opposed the extra dangers and headaches posed by a radioactive white presence in Lowndes, but Carmichael prevailed with the Bob Moses argument that a freedom movement could not throw up barriers of race. He assured Bob Mants, Willie Vaughn, and other SNCC workers that white volunteers would not overrun them as in Mississippi Summer. Carefully, after Daniels, the wonder of a rabbi and wife soon appeared behind knocks on sharecropper doors, wearing business dress in July heat, radiating with news that the trick questions were banished.

Registration lines lurched forward without the literacy exams. “We've fought for the removal of this test for so long it's hard to believe it's really gone,” Stokely Carmichael declared in a SNCC press release. Mass meetings at Mt. Gillard Baptist ratcheted up from weekly to nightly for the push, and Carmichael, though far from conventionally religious, preached to high-spirited crowds in the language of the Bible. He imagined from the visionary text of Ezekiel how black folks of Lowndes would rise up dancing like “dry bones” in the valley of Israel, the sinews of life restored.