The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (23 page)

In the mornings, after the 300 were on the road again, we would ride out on trucks and help clean up their campsite. The days were wet and cold. The mud was deep and black and sticky. I had a fever.

About 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24, Roy and Bob and I climbed aboard an enclosed truck with about 50 black people and a couple of other whites to ride to the last night's encampment at the City of St. Jude, a Catholic hospital-school complex just inside the Montgomery city limits. When we arrived, a large crowd already was milling about the tents and trucks, waiting for the big show that singer Harry Belafonte had put together to entertain the marchers. The people were searching for dry spots to sit and eat the sack lunches that were being distributed, but rain earlier in the day had made the place a quagmire.

Everything was going wrong. The lights and sound equipment which Mr. Belafonte had sent from New York to Montgomery had wound up in New Orleans. At 7:30, when darkness had fallen and the show was supposed to begin, a work crew still was trying to rig makeshift lights and speakers on the stage, which was built of coffin boxes.

As the crowd grew, it became restless. The people in back began to push the people in front closer and closer toward the stage. The marshals surrounded the stage and locked arms to try to keep the crowd back, but we couldn't. Soon we were crushed against the coffin boxes. Then, when we managed to move the people who were crushing us back a few feet, they were crushed between us and those who were pushing from behind. After two hours of this, when it seemed that our arms were about to be pulled from their sockets, the lights came on, Mr. Belafonte stepped onto the stage, the crowd calmed, and the show began at last.

Sammy Davis, Jr., Shelley Winters, Dick Gregory, Leonard Bernstein, Billy Eckstine, Alan King, Anthony Perkins, Tony Bennett, Odetta, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio and about 20 more celebrities performed or made short speeches. So did Dr. Ralph Bunche, Dr. King and other leaders of the movement.

When the show ended, I went to pick up my gear for the ride to the First CME Church, where the marshals had been assigned to eat and sleep. My overcoat was missing. It was old and not much of a loss, but my Anacin and cough medicine were in its pockets.

By the time my friends and I got to the church, all the food was gone, and every square foot of the basement, sanctuary, pews, balcony, chancel and classrooms were covered with sleeping bodies. We finally found a tiny storeroom on the third floor that had only one occupant. We unrolled our sleeping bags and lay down without bothering to take off our clothes or even get inside the bags.

It was 3:30 a.m.

I looked forward and couldn't see the beginning of the column. I looked back and couldn't see the end. Marchers were streaming into the column from the side streets like tributaries flowing into a great river. Many wore their church clothes. Well-wishers lined the streets. Kindergarten children on the sidewalks were singing freedom songs, led by their teachers. Ancient, toothless women grinned and waved at us from their porches.

The mood of the marchers was different from what it had been when the march started Sunday. Then, our mood was quiet determination. We had walked in silence, ignoring the jeers and taunts of those who hated us. But now our determination had become triumph, and the streets echoed with shouts, freedom songs, hymns and laughter. “Come on!” the marchers shouted to the onlookers. “Come on! We're not afraid!”

There were 25,000 of us now. As we neared downtown, only a few white people watched us from the sidewalks, but the windows of stores and offices were full of faces. There were fewer insults, or maybe they were just harder to hear over our own tumult. A meek-looking little man with a frightened grin on his face stood in the street and held a small Confederate flag above his head.

Some were on our side. A white boy ran out of a restaurant carrying two soft drinks and gave them to two black women just ahead of me. “Pass these around to your friends,” he said. Then he went and stood on the sidewalk, smiling. He was about 18 years old.

At last we reached the plaza of Dexter Avenue. There stood the beautiful white capitol, gleaming in the sun. The Alabama and Confederate flags flew at the top of its dome. The Stars and Stripes were nowhere visible. On the porch stood many official-looking men. Gov. Wallace wasn't among them. He was in his office, we learned later, watching from behind the slats of the Venetian blinds.

On the capitol porch lay a large slab of plywood. Several green-helmeted state troopers were standing on it. The wood covered a brass plaque marking the spot where Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as president of the Confederacy 104 years earlier. I heard later that the troopers were afraid Dr. King might stand on it and make his speech from there. But he and the other leaders were on a flatbed truck near the foot of the capitol steps. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy stepped to the microphone and said: “I'd like to sing the national anthem, but I don't see an American flag here.” Instantly, hundreds of flags, large and small, rose above the crowd.

“We have been drenched by the rain,” Dr. King said. “Our bodies are tired. Our feet are sore. They told us we wouldn't get here. And there are those who said we would get here over their dead bodies.”

“Speak!” the crowd said. “Speak!”

“Segregation is on its death bed in Alabama,” he said, “and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.”

When he finished, we sang
We Shall Overcome
, and suddenly it was over. The crowd began breaking up. The troops who had protected us were released from duty. Bob and Roy and I, carrying our gear, followed the stream of people a few blocks, then began asking the way to the Greyhound station.

We turned a corner and suddenly we were alone in white Montgomery. Three white men were following us, shouting. They followed us for blocks. Then three young black men standing at a street comer saw us and heard them and understood what was happening. “Would you like us to walk with you where you're going?” one of them asked.

“Yes, we would,” I said.

Soon the white men faded away and we were safely inside the station. Two hours later, our bus departed. Nearly all the passengers had been in the march. One of them had a radio. Not long after we left Montgomery, he said, “Oh, God. There's been a murder.”

It was Viola Liuzzo, 39 years old, mother of five, from Detroit. She lived in the Green Street Baptist Church, where we lived. She had been one of the hardest workers among us. While she was driving from Selma to Montgomery, still working after the march, some unidentified men in a car had forced her car off the road and shot her in the head.

I sat alone on the front seat of the bus, opposite the driver. I was hungry and exhausted. My fever was high and climbing. I didn't know it, but my cold had become bronchial pneumonia.

During the night, my brain became a whirl of nightmarish images and sounds. Whenever the driver would hit the brake or steer around a curve I would jerk awake, and in the highway ahead, in the beam of the headlights, I would see hooded Klansmen standing.

Maybe I talked or made a noise. One of the other passengers came forward and sat by me. He was a burly, white-bearded man, about 55 or 60 years old. He spoke with an Irish brogue. His name was Tim Murphy, he said. In his youth, he was in the Irish Republican Army, and had fled to America in 1923, a fugitive from the British. He was a labor organizer for the Longshoremen's Union on the New York waterfront.

“Some young man should have climbed to the top of the capitol and raised the Stars and Stripes,” he said. “That wouldn't have been very nonviolent, though.” He talked all night of Ireland and ancient kings named Brian.

At midnight on March 27, we arrived in New York. Roy and Bob and I were supposed to board another bus immediately and continue on to Boston. “Don't go,” Tim Murphy said. “Come have a drink with me. There's another bus in two hours.” Roy, a teetotaler, declined and boarded the bus for Boston, but Bob and I accepted. Mr. Murphy took us to an Irish bar near the waterfront. “Now you're ill,” he said to me. “You must do as I tell you.” He ordered us corned beef sandwiches and shots of Irish whiskey and beer chasers. He paid for it all and proposed a toast: “To freedom.”

He proposed the toast many times. Neither Bob nor I would remember how we got on the 2 a.m. bus to Boston. We slept all the way home.

March 1990

GOING WITH THE DAWGS

There are no fans so rabid as the followers of six-man football, partly because it's an exciting game to watch, and partly because it's played in towns where absolutely nothing else is going on. People have time to think long on it, and fine-tune their emotions. I know this because I played six-man football in the early 1950s for the Fort Davis Indians
.

T
HE
TALL
BLUE
LETTERS
ON
THE
WATER
TOWER
ARE
BEGINNING TO
fade but still can be read, even from the interstate:

STATE CHAMPS 1979-'80

At the foot of the tower, the fry cook at the County Line Cafe has just served up the day's last Ellis County Collider Burger and is cleaning his grill. The cafe occupies one end of the Milford One Stop, which also is a grocery store and a garage. The grocery store is empty of people, but the loud thumps and clangs echoing from the garage out back say that someone is trying to separate a flat tire from its rim.

Across the street at the Country Corner, a boy wearing a cowboy hat is pumping Fina unleaded into his Ford Ranger. He's the only soul in sight. The Ellis County State Bank and the Milford Cash Grocery have been locked up for the night.

They, along with the One Stop and the Country Corner, account for nearly all the commerce in Milford, so the parking spots along the sidewalks are empty. So is the street.

At six o'clock on the first evening of September, the sun is still high and brutal and the school year hasn't started yet. But 200 of Milford's citizens (a sign on the edge of town says “About 700 Friendly People Plus 3 or 4 Old Grouches” live here) have come to Horton Field, “Home of the Mighty Bulldogs,” to watch the beginning of their autumn.

They're sitting in lawn chairs and on parked cars along the sidelines, and in the bleachers along the north side of the field. Behind them, beyond the rows of parked cars, on the lawn of Milford School, little children have started a football game of their own.

On the west end of the field the Gordon Longhorns are warming up, and on the east end, the Milford Bulldogs. They've been warming up a long time. Coach Kevin Ray and his assistant, Brad Lane, glance nervously at their watches. “The officials are late,” Coach Ray says. “If they don't get here soon, the coaches will have to referee.”

The people leaning on the cars and sitting in the bleachers cast appraising eyes on the hometown boys, and on Coach Ray and Coach Lane, hoping for omens of greatness. “Get ‘em, Dawgs!” they cry.

It isn't to be a real game, only a scrimmage. The first real game is still two weeks and 200 miles away, against Moran. But the Milford cheerleaders—Shelia, Robin, Kellie, Renee, Taree, Rachel, Beth and Jennifer—are dolled up in dress uniform and already in full cry.

“Oh,” says Ron Scott, Milford's sixth-grade teacher and most vocal fan, “you come out here on an October night when it's just cool enough to wear a little light jacket, and the old moon is so bright, and every fan knows every player, and every daddy's rooting and every mama's rooting and every girlfriend's rooting, and the boys are playing their hearts out… Well, it doesn't get any better than that. No time. Nowhere.”

A red station wagon turns off the highway. The officials have arrived. The Bulldogs and the Longhorns take the field. The trill of the referee's whistle pierces the air.

In Milford, winning is a strong tradition. Back in 1978, the Bulldogs lost only one game. That was to the Cherokee Indians—the eventual state champions—in the quarterfinals. Then they played two undefeated seasons and won back-to-back state championships in 1979 and 1980. They've made the state playoffs four of the past five years. Last year, May beat them, 54-20, in the quarterfinals. Then Zephyr beat May, 54-36, in the semifinals. Then Fort Hancock clobbered Zephyr, 76-30, for the state title.

Indeed, Zephyr got 45-pointed, a numbing humiliation in a championship game.

Maybe you haven't heard of Zephyr or May or Fort Hancock. Maybe Milford is just a sign on I-35E between Waxahachie and Hillsboro and a water tower in the distance. And you never read in the sports pages of Jamie Aguilar of Fort Hancock, Matt Mann of Higgins, Darrell Paul of New Home, Lewis Knapp of Trent, Bryan Keith of Zephyr or Bud Venable of Bovina, even though they made the All-State Team last year. None of them will make the pros. It's almost certain that none will play on a college team. It's unlikely that they even will be recruited.

And if you don't know about getting 45-pointed, well, you don't know about six-man football.

Coach Ray didn't know, until he graduated from college about five years ago and needed a job. “I'd never seen or heard of six-man ball,” he says, “but I was offered the coaching job at Blum, and I took it sight unseen. I fell in love with the game. It's better fit for smaller, quicker kids than 11-man is. And you have to be in better condition to play it. There's a lot more running, and most of the players stay on the field longer than in 11-man.

“A big, strong, slow guy who might be a star 11-man lineman…well, in six-man he'd just be slow. The other team would run around him like he was a rock.”