A Writer's Life (27 page)

Clark must have sensed, too, that John Lewis was crazy, or so recklessly righteous that he was dangerous, or at least too confusing to deal with at this time. Clark took a step back, turned toward his troops, and signaled with his club in the air for them to separate their ranks. Then he faced his
nemesis once again, and, after nodding his head toward the courthouse door, he said in a voice that was surly but soft, “Goddamn it, go on in.”

Saying nothing, showing no gesture of gratitude or even making eye contact with the sheriff, John Lewis proceeded toward the steps of the courthouse with his followers trailing solemnly behind him—and J. L. Chestnut, Jr., continued to watch with amazement, reminding himself, There's no way Lewis could not have been scared to death, but he stood his ground and won! And he didn't have any pistols. He didn't have any troops. He just had about twenty resolute folk there in a little line. Yet he stood face-to-face with the power of Alabama and refused on moral grounds to give in … and Alabama blinked … and to hell with Hare.…

But on the next occasion when Chestnut would observe John Lewis in such a situation, leading a line of black people across the Selma bridge on the Sunday morning of March 7, 1965, he would see Lewis's body flattened along the highway, his bones battered, his head bleeding, and his skull fractured, and Sheriff Clark and dozens of other law-enforcement figures chasing the retreating marchers back to Brown Chapel, leaving seventeen of them strewn along the road in pain and coughing from the gas until they were hauled away to a segregated hospital. The police attack had been so quick that even Lewis, with all his experience in the front lines of SNCC and as a Freedom Rider, had not foreseen this calamity, this vengeful rampage by the police, which Lewis would come to know as one of the worst and best days of his life.

Until a few minutes before his concussion he had been walking as casually as if he were on a Sunday stroll through a park, guiding a merry gathering of picnic-bound kinfolk. There were songs coming from behind him, the harmonizing of black men and women allied in their solidarity, carrying together with their satchels the burdens of their beliefs and a sense that they were on the right road to some form of redemption. Keeping pace with Lewis was King's representative, Hosea Williams, and behind them were a pair of voting-rights organizers from nearby Lowndes and Perry counties (the latter being the locale of Jimmie Lee Jackson's murder); behind these men were two veteran female activists from Selma—one a dental hygienist, the other a Tuskegee-trained agrarian economist who worked with farming families and was striving to get them registered; and behind them came the pastor from Brown Chapel, together with an educator who taught science at the black high school; and trailing them, in tandem, were hundreds of others, men and women of various occupations and ages and also many students, nearly all of them
wearing their Sunday best and obeying their elders' instructions that they walk only on the sidewalk through the business district and behave in a modest and orderly fashion, even though every black person in this long procession was guilty of what Judge Hare termed “disorderly conduct.”

Still, the police did not stop them as they proceeded through Selma's shopping area, nor were they impeded by anyone among the cranky crowds of white people who stood watching along the storefronts. But after the marchers in the lead had begun crossing the arched center section of the bridge, they could see that the highway ahead was blocked by lines of helmeted men. As John Lewis got closer, he recognized some of the blue-uniformed officers of the state police and the khaki-clad mounted members of the sheriff's posse, and, of course, Jim Clark himself. Lewis intended to keep walking until he reached the roadblock, and then he assumed he would be told that he was under arrest and would be sent to jail until J. L. Chestnut, Jr., bailed him out. This had become rather pro forma for John Lewis as a youthful but highly experienced civil rights worker. He had already been arrested more than thirty times since he had begun sitting in at Tennessee lunch counters five years before, and while as a Freedom Rider he had been slapped, kicked, spat upon, and pistol-whipped by white mobs and the police, he did not anticipate any physical harm coming his way today on the highway to Montgomery. Clark's recent timidity at the courthouse possibly contributed to Lewis's thinking, and so he continued to move ahead without concern as he got to within three hundred feet of the police and heard one of the officers begin to shout through a bullhorn, “… I give you three minutes to disperse and go back to your church. This is an unlawful march. It will not be allowed to continue.”

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 brandishing 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.