Edge of Eternity (55 page)

Near the end she wanted to get on top. This, too, was new: no woman had done that with him before. She knelt astride him, and he held her hips and moved with her. She closed her eyes, but he did not. He watched her face, fascinated and enthralled, and when at last she reached her climax, he did too.

A few minutes before midnight he stood at the window in a robe, looking down on the street lights of Fifth Avenue, while Verena was in the bathroom. His mind returned to the agreement King had struck with Birmingham’s whites. If it was a triumph for the civil rights movement, die-hard segregationists would not accept defeat, he guessed; but what
would
they do? Bull Connor undoubtedly had a plan for sabotaging the agreement. So, presumably, did George Wallace, the racist Governor.

That day the Ku Klux Klan had held a rally at Bessemer, a small town eighteen miles from Birmingham. According to Bobby Kennedy’s intelligence, supporters had come from Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Mississippi. No doubt their speakers had spent the evening working them up into a frenzy of indignation about Birmingham giving in to the blacks. By now the women and children must have gone home, but the men would have started drinking and bragging to one another about what they were going to do.

Tomorrow would be Mother’s Day – Sunday, 12 May. George recalled Mother’s Day two years ago, when white people had tried to kill him and other Freedom Riders by firebombing their bus at Anniston, sixty miles from here.

Verena emerged from the bathroom. ‘Come back to bed,’ she said, getting under the sheet.

George was eager. He hoped to make love to her at least once more before dawn. But just as he was about to turn away from the window, something caught his eye. The headlights of two cars were approaching along Fifth Avenue. The first vehicle was a white Birmingham Police Department patrol car, clearly marked with the number 25. It was followed by an old round-nosed Chevrolet from the early fifties. Both cars slowed as they drew level with the Gaston.

George suddenly noticed that the cops and state troopers who had been patrolling the streets around the motel had vanished. There was no one on the street.

What the hell . . . ?

A second later, something was thrown from the open rear window of the Chevrolet, across the sidewalk, to the wall of the motel. The object landed right underneath the windows of the corner suite, room 30, which Martin Luther King had occupied until he left earlier that day.

Then both cars accelerated.

George turned from the window, crossed the room in two strides, and threw himself on top of Verena.

Her yell of protest was just beginning when it was drowned by a tremendous boom. The entire building shook as if in an earthquake. The air filled with the sounds of smashing glass and the rumble of falling masonry. The window of their room shattered with a tinkling noise like death chimes. There was a creepy moment of quiet. As the sound of the two cars faded, George heard shouts and screams from within the building.

He said to Verena: ‘Are you okay?’

She said: ‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Someone threw a bomb from a car.’ He frowned. ‘The car had a police escort. Can you believe that?’

‘In this goddamn town? You bet I can.’

George rolled off her and looked around the room. He saw broken glass all over the floor. A piece of green cloth was draped over the end of the bed, and after a moment he realized it was the curtain. A picture of President Roosevelt had been blown off the wall by the force of the blast, and lay face up on the carpet, crazed glass over the President’s smile.

Verena said: ‘We have to go downstairs. People may be hurt.’

‘Wait a minute,’ George said. ‘I’ll get your shoes.’ He put his feet down on a clear patch of the rug. To cross the room he had to pick up shards of glass and throw them aside. His shoes and hers were side by side in the closet: he liked that. He put his feet into his black leather oxfords, then picked up Verena’s white kitten-heels and took them to her.

The lights went out.

They both dressed quickly in the dark. They discovered there was no water in the bathroom. They went downstairs.

The darkened lobby was full of panicking hotel staff and guests. Several people were bleeding but it seemed no one was dead. George pushed his way outside. By the street lights he saw a hole five feet across in the wall of the building, and a spill of heavyweight rubble across the pavement. Trailers parked in the adjacent lot had been wrecked by the force of the blast. But, by a miracle, no one had been badly injured.

A cop arrived with a dog, then an ambulance drew up, then more police. Ominously, groups of Negroes began to gather outside the motel and in Kelly Ingram Park on the next block. These people were not the non-violent Christians who had marched joyfully out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing hymns, George noted anxiously. This crowd had spent Saturday evening drinking in bars and pool halls and juke joints, and they did not subscribe to the Gandhian philosophy of passive resistance favoured by Martin Luther King.

Someone said there had been another bomb, a few blocks away, at the parsonage occupied by Martin Luther King’s brother, Alfred, always known as A. D. King. An eyewitness had seen a uniformed cop place a package in the porch a few seconds before the blast. Clearly the Birmingham police had tried to murder both King brothers at the same time.

The crowd got angrier.

Soon they were throwing bottles and rocks. Dogs and water cannon were the favourite targets. George went back inside the motel. Verena was helping to rescue an elderly black woman from a wrecked ground-floor room by torchlight.

‘It’s getting nasty out there,’ George said to Verena. ‘They’re throwing rocks at the police.’

‘So they damn well should. The police are the bombers.’

‘Think about this,’ George said urgently. ‘Why do the whites want a riot tonight? To sabotage the agreement.’

She wiped plaster dust off her forehead. George watched her face and saw rage replaced by calculation. ‘Damn, you’re right,’ she said.

‘We can’t let them do it.’

‘But how can we stop it?’

‘We have to get all the movement leaders out there calming people down.’

She nodded. ‘Hell, yes. I’ll start rounding people up.’

George went back outside. The riot had escalated fast. A taxicab had been overturned and torched, and was blazing in the middle of the road. A block away, a grocery store was alight. Squad cars approaching from downtown were halted at Seventeenth Street by a hail of missiles.

George grabbed a megaphone and addressed the crowd. ‘Everybody stay calm!’ he said. ‘Don’t jeopardize our deal! The segregationists are trying to provoke a riot – don’t give them what they want! Go home to bed!’

A black man standing nearby said to him: ‘How come
we
have to go home every time
they
start violence!’

George jumped on the hood of a parked car and stood on the roof. ‘This is not helping us!’ he said. ‘Our movement is non-violent! Everybody go home!’

Someone yelled: ‘We’re non-violent, but they ain’t!’

Then an empty whisky bottle flew through the air and hit George’s forehead. He climbed down from the roof of the car. He touched his head. It hurt, but it was not bleeding.

Others took up his cry. Verena appeared with several movement leaders and preachers, and they all mingled with the crowd, trying to talk people down. A. D. King got up on a car. ‘Our home was just bombed,’ he cried. ‘We say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But you are not helping – you are hurting us! Please, clear this park!’

Slowly, it began to work. Bull Connor was nowhere to be seen, George noted: the man in charge was Chief of Police Jamie Moore – a law enforcement professional rather than a political appointee – and that helped. The police attitude seemed to have changed. Dog handlers and firemen no longer seemed eager for a fight. George heard a cop saying to a group of Negroes: ‘We’re your friends!’ It was bullshit, but a new kind of bullshit.

There were hawks and doves among the segregationists, George realized. Martin Luther King had allied himself with the doves, and thereby outflanked the hawks. Now the hawks were trying to reignite the fires of hatred. They could not be allowed to succeed.

Lacking the stimulus of police aggression, the crowd lost the will to riot. George began to hear a different kind of comment. When the burning grocery store collapsed, people sounded penitent. ‘That’s a doggone shame,’ said one man, and another said: ‘We gone too far.’

At last the preachers got them singing, and George relaxed. It was all over, he felt.

He found Chief Moore on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. ‘We need to get repair crews to the motel, chief,’ he said politely. ‘Power and water are out, and it’s going to get insanitary in there pretty quickly.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Moore, and put his walkie-talkie to his ear.

But before he could speak into it, the state troopers arrived.

They wore blue helmets and they carried carbines and double-barrelled shotguns. They arrived in a rush, most in cars, some on horseback. Within seconds there were two hundred or more. George stared in horror. This was a catastrophe – they would restart the riot. But that was what Governor George Wallace wanted, he realized. Wallace, like Bull Connor and the bombers, saw that the only hope now for the segregationists was a complete breakdown of law and order.

A car drew up and Wallace’s Director of Public Safety, Colonel Al Lingo, jumped out, toting a shotgun. Two men with him, apparently bodyguards, had Thompson sub-machine guns.

Chief Moore holstered his walkie-talkie. He spoke softly, but carefully did not address Lingo by his military rank. ‘If you’d leave, Mr Lingo, I’d appreciate it.’

Lingo did not trouble to be courteous. ‘Get your cowardly ass back to your office,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge now, and my orders are to put those black bastards to bed.’

George expected them to tell him to get lost, but they were too intent on their argument to care about him.

‘Those guns are not needed,’ said Moore. ‘Will you please put them up? Somebody’s going to get killed.’

‘You’re damn right!’ said Lingo.

George walked away quickly, heading back to the motel.

Just before he went inside he turned to look, just in time to see the state troopers charge the crowd.

Then the riot started all over again.

George found Verena in the motel courtyard. ‘I have to go to Washington,’ he said.

He did not want to go. He wanted to spend time with Verena, talking to her, deepening their new-found intimacy. He wanted to make her fall in love with him. But that would have to wait.

She said: ‘What are you going to do in Washington?’

‘Make sure the Kennedy brothers understand what’s happening. They have to be told that Governor Wallace is provoking violence in order to undermine the deal.’

‘It’s three o’clock in the morning.’

‘I’d like to get to the airport as early as possible and catch the first flight out. I might have to go via Atlanta.’

‘How will you get to the airport?’

‘I’m going to look for a taxi.’

‘No cab will pick up a black man tonight – especially one with a lump on his forehead.’

George touched his face exploratively and found a bump just where she said. ‘How did that happen?’ he said.

‘I seem to remember seeing a bottle hit you.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, it may be dumb, but I have to try to get to the airport.’

‘What about your luggage?’

‘I can’t pack in the dark. Besides, I don’t have much. I’m just going to go.’

‘Be careful,’ she said.

He kissed her. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her slim body to his. ‘It was great,’ she whispered. Then she let him go.

He left the motel. The avenues heading directly downtown were blocked to the east: he would have to take a circuitous route. He walked west then north, then turned east when he felt he was well clear of the rioting. He did not see any taxis. He might have to wait for the first bus of Sunday morning.

A faint light was showing in the eastern sky when a car screeched to a halt alongside him. He got ready to run, fearing white vigilantes, then changed his mind when three state troopers got out, rifles at the ready.

They won’t need much of an excuse to kill me, he thought fearfully.

The leader was a short man with a swagger. George noticed he had a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. ‘Where are you going, boy?’ the sergeant said.

‘I’m trying to get to the airport, Sarge,’ George said. ‘Maybe you can tell me where I can find a taxicab.’

The leader turned to the others with a grin. ‘He’s trying to get to the airport,’ he repeated, as if the idea were risible. ‘He thinks we can help him find a taxi!’

His subordinates laughed appreciatively.

‘What are you going to do at the airport?’ the sergeant asked George. ‘Clean the toilets?’

‘I’m going to catch a plane to Washington. I work at the Department of Justice. I’m a lawyer.’

‘Is that so? Well, I work for George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, and we don’t pay too much mind to Washington, down here. So get in the goddamn car before I break your woolly head.’

‘What are you arresting me for?’

‘Don’t get smart with me, boy.’

‘If you seize me without good cause, you’re a criminal, not a trooper.’

With a sudden quick motion the sergeant swung his rifle, butt first. George ducked and instinctively raised his hand to protect his face. The wooden butt of the rifle struck his left wrist painfully. The other two troopers seized his arms. He offered no resistance, but they dragged him along as if he were struggling. The sergeant opened the rear door of the car and they threw him on the back seat. They slammed the door before he was fully inside, and it jammed his leg, causing him to shout in pain. They opened the door again, shoved his injured leg inside, and closed the door.

He lay slumped on the back seat. His leg hurt but his wrist was worse. They can do anything they like to us, he thought, because we’re black. At that moment he wished he had thrown rocks and bottles at the police instead of running around telling people to calm down and go home.