Three Days Before the Shooting ... (6 page)

“I’ve told you that the Senator isn’t here,” she said, “and you must realize that he is a busy man who can only see people by appointment.”

“We know, ma’am,” Hickman said, “but—”

“You don’t just walk in here and expect to see him on a minute’s notice.”

“We understand that, ma’am,” Hickman said, looking mildly into her eyes, his close-cut white head tilted to one side, “but this is something that developed of a sudden. Couldn’t you reach him by long distance? We’d pay the charges. And I don’t even have to talk, miss; you can do the talking. All you have to say is that we have arrived.”

“I’m afraid this is impossible,” she said.

The very evenness of the old man’s voice made her feel uncomfortably young, and now, deciding that she had exhausted all the tried-and-true techniques which her region had worked out (short of violence) for getting quickly rid of Negroes, the secretary lost her patience and telephoned for a guard.

They left as quietly as they had appeared, the old minister waiting behind until the last had stepped into the hall. Then he turned, and she saw his full height, framed by the doorway, as the others arranged themselves beyond him in the hall. “You’re really making a mistake, miss,” he said. “The Senator knows us and—”

“
Knows
you,” she said indignantly. “I’ve heard Senator Sunraider state that the only colored he knows is the boy who shines shoes at his golf club.”

“Oh?” Hickman shook his head as the others exchanged knowing glances. “Very well, ma’am,” Hickman said. “We’re sorry to have caused you this trouble. It’s just that it’s very important that the Senator know that we’re on the scene. So I hope you won’t forget to tell him that we have arrived, because soon it might be too late.”

There was no threat in it; indeed, his voice echoed the odd sadness which she thought she detected in the faces of the others just before the door blotted them from view.

In the hall they exchanged no words, moving silently behind the guard, who accompanied them down to the lobby. They were about to move into the street, when the security-minded chief guard, observing their number, stepped up and ordered them searched.

They submitted patiently, amused that anyone should consider them capable of harm, and for the first time an emotion broke the immobility of their faces. They chuckled and winked and smiled, fully aware of the comic aspect of the situation. Here they were, quiet, old, and obviously religious black folk who, because they had attempted to see the man who was considered the most vehement enemy of their people in either house of Congress, were being energetically searched by uniformed security police, and they knew what the absurd outcome would be. They were found to be armed with nothing more dangerous than pieces of fried chicken and ham sandwiches, chocolate cake and sweet-potato fried pies. Some obeyed the guards’ commands with exaggerated sprightliness, the old ladies giving their skirts a whirl as they turned in their flat-heeled shoes. When ordered to remove his wide-brimmed hat, one old man held it for the guard to look inside; then, flipping out the sweatband, he gave the crown a tap, causing something to fall to the floor, then waited with a callused palm extended as the guard bent to retrieve it. Straightening and unfolding the object, the guard saw a worn but neatly creased fifty-dollar bill which he dropped upon the outstretched palm as though it were hot. They watched silently as he looked at the old man and gave a dry, harsh laugh; then as he continued laughing the humor slowly receded behind their eyes. Not until they were allowed to file into the street did they give further voice to their amusement.

“These here folks don’t understand nothing,” one of the old ladies said. “If we had been the kind to depend on the sword instead of on the Lord, we’d been in our graves long ago—ain’t that right, Sis Arter?”

“You said it,” Sister Arter said. “In the grave and done long finished molding!”

“Let them worry, our conscience is clear on that ….”

“Amen!”

On the sidewalk now, they stood around Reverend Hickman, holding a hushed conference, then in a few minutes they had disappeared in a string of taxis and the incident was thought closed.

Shortly afterwards, however, they appeared mysteriously at a hotel where the Senator leased a private suite, and tried to see him. How they knew of this secret suite they would not explain.

Next, they appeared at the editorial office of the newspaper which had been most critical of the Senator’s methods, but here, too, they were turned away. They were taken for a protest group, just one more lot of disgruntled Negroes crying for justice as though theirs were the only grievances in the world. Indeed, they received less of a hearing here than elsewhere. They weren’t even questioned as to why they wished to see the Senator—which was poor newspaper work, to say the least; a failure of technical alertness, and, as events were soon to prove, a gross violation of press responsibility.

So once more they moved away.

Although the Senator returned to Washington the following day, his secretary failed to report his strange visitors. There were important interviews scheduled, and she had understandably classified the old people as just another annoyance. Once the reception room was cleared of their disquieting presence, they seemed no more significant than the heavy mail received from white liberals and Negroes, liberal and reactionary alike, whenever the Senator made one of his taunting remarks. She forgot them. Then at about eleven
A.M
. Reverend Hickman reappeared without the others and started into the building. This time, however, he was not to reach the secretary. One of the guards, the same who had picked up the fifty-dollar bill, recognized him and pushed him bodily from the building.

Indeed, the old man was handled quite roughly, his sheer weight and bulk and the slow rhythm of his normal movements infuriating the guard to that quick, heated fury which springs up in one when dealing with the unexpected recalcitrance of some inanimate object. Say, the huge stone that resists the bulldozer’s power or the chest of drawers that refuses to budge from its spot on the floor. Nor did the old man’s composure help matters. Nor did his passive resistance hide his distaste at having strange hands placed upon his person. As he was being pushed about, old Hickman looked at the guard with a kind of tolerance, an understanding which seemed to remove his personal emotions to some far, cool place where the guard’s strength could never reach them. He even managed to pick up his hat from the sidewalk, where it had been thrown after him, with no great show of breath or hurry, and arose to regard the guard with a serene dignity.

“Son,” he said, flicking a spot of dirt from the soft old panama with a white handkerchief, “I’m sorry that this had to happen to you. Here you’ve worked up a sweat on this hot morning, and not a thing has been changed—except that you’ve interfered with something that doesn’t concern you. After all, you’re only a guard, you’re not a mind reader. Because if you were, you’d be trying to get me in there as fast as you could instead of trying to keep me
out. You’re probably not even a good guard, and I wonder what on earth you’d do if I came here prepared to make some trouble. You think of trouble as coming from numbers, but you’re wrong. It comes in all sizes.”

Fortunately, there were too many spectators present for the guard to risk giving the old fellow a demonstration, and he was compelled to stand silent, his thumbs hooked over his cartridge belt, while old Hickman strolled—or, more accurately,
floated
—up the walk and disappeared around the corner.

Except for two attempts by telephone, once to the Senator’s office and later to his home, the group made no further effort until that afternoon, when Hickman sent a telegram asking Senator Sunraider to phone him at a T Street hotel. A message, which, thanks again to the secretary, the Senator did not see. Following this attempt there was silence.

During the late afternoon the group of closemouthed old folk were seen praying quietly within the Lincoln Memorial. An amateur photographer, a high-school boy from the Bronx, was there at the time, and it was his chance photograph of the group, standing with bowed heads beneath old Hickman’s outspread arms while facing the great sculpture, that was flashed over the wires following the shooting. Asked why he had photographed that particular group, the boy replied that he had seen them as a “good composition ….

I thought their faces would make a fine scale of grays between the whiteness of the marble and the blackness of the shadows.” And for the rest of the day the group appears to have faded into those same peaceful shadows, to remain there until the next morning—when they materialized shortly before chaos erupted.

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

U
NDERSTAND ME
, I was there; sitting in the press section at the start of the shooting. I had been rereading M. Vannec’s most unexpected letter when suddenly it was as though a certain long-forgotten night of violence to which he referred had flared from the page and accelerated into chaotic life.

First, the popping sound had drawn my attention down to the orating Senator; then, far across in the visitors’ gallery, there came a flash of movement—and then it was as though the letter had caught flame in my hands. Then, for some reason the photographic image of the elegant magnesium-bodied sports car which ignited and burned during the recent running of the Le Mans Grand Prix—that awe-inspiring sabre of flame and destruction—flashed through my mind just as I was looking out past the great chandelier of the chamber to see an elegantly dressed man lean over the visitors’- gallery rail and point down to where, gripping the sides of the lectern and tossing his head, Senator Sunraider was speaking. Then things seemed to reel out of phase.

Directly below me, on the floor of the chamber, the Senator’s colleagues sat calmly engrossed in his argument, while along the curving rail to either side of the pointing man I could see visitors leaping to their feet and away, scattering. Then something thudded against the lectern, and somewhere above me I could hear a gay, erratic ringing, like the musical jangling of a huge bunch of keys.

Then, as the sound and the rising of the man’s arm flew together in my mind, my nerves snapped like a window shade: He was firing a pistol at the Senator.
Oh, no
, I thought,
OH, NO! We were only betting, it was all in fun. This can’t be happening!

Yet, with the swiftness of glass ornaments sent bursting from a Christmas tree by the fire of a circus sharpshooter, arrows of prismatic light were flying from the swaying chandelier. And above the furious action below me there
sounded a ringing as of a thousand crystal bells, the hysterical cries of women. From somewhere in the distance came the angry shrilling of a whistle, the harsh staccato of commands.

On the floor directly below me I now could see the Senator staggering backwards, and around in a narrow circle, a spot of blood blooming on his face. Then he seemed to look up to where the gunman, crouching now, his elbows resting on the railing, gripped the pistol with both hands and got off a final shot.

This time the Senator was sent lurching sideways, turning to his left, and I could hear him calling out in a strangely transformed voice and going over to land on his back. Then, “My God! My God!” some man was calling, and it was bedlam.

Behind Senator Sunraider, members of the Senate were scattering and dodging, hitting the floor and yelling, making for the exits. A pair of eyeglasses glittered near the leg of an overturned chair, while across the vast space of the chamber, past the swaying chandelier, I could see three guards fighting their way through the milling spectators—several of them Negro women—trying to get to the gunman who, standing erect now, turned to look behind him, his movements oddly like those of one intentionally deaf to all sounds of external confusion. He seemed absolutely calm, as now, immediately behind him, I could see, looming up like a bear suddenly cresting a hill, a huge old whiteheaded Negro. This man yells something which I can’t grasp as he rushed toward the gunman, stepping over a bench and down like a bear hurdling a stone fence, his arms outstretched as he calls out once more.

The effect is electric. Suddenly the gunman throws down his weapon and seems to freeze, waiting. Then, as the old Negro comes on down the aisle, the gunman swivels suddenly and throws his leg over the railing, resting there a moment, his arms rigid as he grips the railing with both hands, calmly contemplating the approaching man.

“Wait, boy! Wait!” I hear. Then above the turbulent heads I see a pistol waving, and a uniformed guard bursts into view behind the old Negro who turns, suddenly enfolding the helpless guard in his great arms, yells out once more, “Wait!”

Seizing the incongruous images of the man on the rail, the old Negro, and the struggling guard, my mind leaps ahead on a wave of heat and nausea, lifting me from my chair. For a moment the gunman stares straight at the old Negro, then, violently shaking his head, he was gone, plunged calmly over the railing.

The nausea shook me then, and I went over—carefully avoiding the railing and the floor below—even as the sound of a crunching impact, the splintering of wood, filled the great room.

There followed a shattering silence which whimpered and gasped, sideslipping and quavering, welling up thunderously in a reverberation that struck the chamber in great tremulous waves. These seemed to last for endless minutes, for vast suspensions of breath. And then, as though what was still in anguished progress wasn’t frightening enough, outrageous enough,
terrible
enough, the old Negro, who is now grasping the gallery rail and looking down at the fallen Senator, suddenly calls out in a voice like a roughly amplified horn and begins to relieve himself of an inarticulate combination of prayer, sermon, prophesy, and song!

It was absolutely confounding! A projection so resonant with anguish, bitterness, yes, and with
indictment
—that for a brief moment that entire frenzied, stampeding body broke its flight to whirl around and stand looking up to where he holds forth, white head thrown back, arms outstretched—caught up in the confounding and full-throated anguish of his cry.