Читать книгу Nobody Said Amen - Tracy Sugarman - Страница 7
Chapter One
ОглавлениеThe cab left the bright neon of the highway from the airport and slowed sharply as it entered the darkened campus.
“You got a kid out here?”
The man in the back seat continued to peer into the darkness. “No,” he said.
“Place’s been deserted since graduation,” said the driver. “Last fare I had out here was two weeks ago.” He caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. “You sure of the address?”
Ted Mendelsohn checked Max’s notes. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
The car’s motor echoed against the silent college buildings as the cab moved slowly ahead behind its probing finger of light. At the rise of a small hill, he tapped the driver’s shoulder. “The hall should be right after the next turn. Let me off at the corner.”
The driver shrugged. “If you say so.”
As the car eased to a stop, two young black men with backpacks crossed from the darkness and trotted toward the single lighted building across the deserted green. The driver turned in his seat. “Not many people around. None of my business, but you sure you want to be out here?”
Mendelsohn watched the two slender figures as they loped into the bright entryway of the orientation building. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
But from the minute he entered the orientation building, he wasn’t so sure. He sensed he wasn’t welcome. As his eyes adjusted to the bright light he saw he was adrift in a sea of khaki and denim, backpacks, knapsacks, and duffle bags, and realized that he was not only the oldest person in the room but the most over-dressed. He heard the hiss of “fuzz,” then, “Watch it. FBI.” What the hell was he thinking when he’d packed for the flight? Christ, he was dressed like he was catching the 8:12 to Grand Central for a meeting with Max at Newsweek. He knew the room was watching and judging. A guy twice their age in a suit and a tie with a Valpack? Going to Mississippi to register black voters? Pissed with himself, he worked his way through the press of bodies and found an uncluttered seat against the wall. He loosened his tie, shed his jacket and stretched his legs, still stiff from the flight. A hell of a way to start, Mendelsohn. He watched the students, and beneath the ripples of laughter and sudden shouts of recognition, he sensed a stifled tension in the room, and it had nothing to do with him. The volunteers looked tentative themselves, doing what he was doing, taking the measure of strangers who would soon be more than strangers.
He got up and crossed to the desk to sign in with the woman from the Council of Churches, remembering meeting her at the New York office. Holmgren? Holstone? “Holstein,” she said with a grin. “Jean Holstein. Glad you could make it, Mr. Mendelsohn.” She checked her pad. “Journalist. Newsweek magazine. Right?”
“Guilty as charged.”
Her eyes drifted across the youthful faces in the chattering room. “Nice to have someone my age going with us, Mr. Mendelsohn.”
He tried not to smile and held out his hand, “At our age, Jean, I think you can call me Ted.”
A short, thin young Negro left a tight knot of blacks. He stood, seriously searching the throbbing hall before approaching the desk.
“Any word?”
Jean nodded. “A message for you, John. Mickey and Rita Schwerner just got in. They asked me to tell you to save them a beer.”
The somber young man nodded, smiling for the first time. “Thanks, Jean. That’s good news. We were hoping they’d make it out. They’ve been checking out the church fires, and they’ve had a rough time.” He nodded briefly to Mendelsohn and trotted to the small black caucus. “Mickey and Rita are here.” Each word seemed newly formed, perhaps a way to eliminate a stutter.
“Who are those kids, Jean?”
“SNCC kids, field workers from Mississippi. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The young guy is John Lewis. He’s in charge.” And that was how the orientation week started for him in Oxford, Ohio, June 1964.
Later, a long week later, one of the SNCC kids, Dennis Flanagan, told him: “It was the seersucker suit you were wearing, man! Everybody saw you thought FBI,” and grinned at the memory.
“No. It was the hat,” insisted Bobby Willis. “Definitely the hat. Nobody but FBI guys have worn hats since Kennedy gave them up.” So when Mendelsohn bought the table a round of beers they pounded the table, and when he announced his next trick, “the disappearance,” they hooted and watched appreciatively as he stepped on his Panama straw hat and tossed it into the trash at the end of the bar. Bobby Willis said, “Nice, Pop.”
On Saturday he called Max at his home in Yonkers. And Max sounded like Max. “Jesus, Teddy, why did you wait all this time to call me? You couldn’t find a phone in Ohio?”
“I was adjusting, Max. Taking stock. Convincing the kids I’m not FBI.”
Max laughed. “You? FBI? Over J. Edgar’s dead body!” His voice dropped. “How’s it going?”
“It’s too soon to know. It’s a deserted campus in the middle of Ohio farm country. You can smell the hay in the fields and see the stars at night. And you can watch the kids, almost five hundred of them this week, white kids mostly.” He paused as a boisterous bunch of volunteers descended from the dining room. “I do. And they’re from everywhere, Max.”
“What about the reporters?”
“A few. AP. UPI. A stringer from the Washington Post. Not a story yet. Not going to be a problem.”
“And Negroes?”
“Mostly field workers from Mississippi. The SNCC kids. They may be our story.” A memory came unannounced. “You remember in ’44 when our outfit arrived in Plymouth, England, after the bombing? You and I were on our first liberty and we ran into a group of RAF pilots? Well, these SNCC kids remind me of them.”
Max said, “Talk to me.”
“They’re tough. They’re cool. They’re sinewy. They’re knowing. And they’re tired.”
“I remember. And?”
“And they’re glad these white kids have come to help. But they own the war they’ve been fighting. Like the RAF kids.” He wanted to find the right words. “And it’s not the white kids’ war because they haven’t been there. Can you remember that feeling in ’44?”
“Yes.”
“Then you remember. They loved each other. Not us. Same thing here. These white college kids are new troops, too shiny-new, maybe. But I can read the questions in the black kids’ eyes.”
“Like?”
“Like can these scrubbed kids make it through a summer in the Delta? Like can they really connect us to power in Washington? Can they find us bail money? Can we trust these strangers?”
Max cut in, irritated. “They don’t trust the students? Why the fuck not? They’ve come to help. What’s the problem?”
Ted hesitated. “It may not be a problem. The SNCC kids aren’t hostile, they want to trust them. But for a lot of them hope has been something that melts in your black hand. It’s going to take a lot of doing, in not much time. And it may be our story, Max.” He looked at the phone that connected him with the commonplace world he’d lived in, a world that was somehow receding. “It doesn’t feel like an Ohio campus, it feels like an arena in the middle of nowhere. It’s a scary space filled with images painted by black field workers who’ve been shot at for trying to register blacks so they can vote in America. They’re conjuring up a Mississippi the volunteers can’t even imagine, that I can’t imagine. The time’s hanging suspended, five days, four days, three days, two till we head for Mississippi. Christ, it feels like our countdown on the ship before D-Day, Max. We both sweated our balls off. I’m twenty years older than these kids and I’ve seen a hell of a lot more than they have, but I find I’m just one more white guy staring at a Mississippi that the blacks insist that I see.”
“You keep calling them kids,” Max said. “They’re not kids.”
“They look like my son, Richard. And they look like my daughter, Laurie. They’re kids to me.”
“That’s fine, Teddy’. Just don’t write it that way. Keep some distance. You’re working for Newsweek, not bucking for father of the year.”
Ted hung up the phone slowly, lingering on the time he’d conjured up of him and Max together—’43? ’44?—in England, and before that, at the midshipman school at Notre Dame. The sailor had told the new arrivals, “Follow me topside to the sixth deck,” and Ted had hoisted his duffle bag and followed the other new midshipmen to their quarters. At the end of the long corridor the sailor began to read the list of their new billets.
“McElroy, Frederick—billet 6A
McElwain, Jack—billet 6A
McKendrick, Alan—billet 6B
Mendelsohn, Theodore—billet 6B
Miller, Max—billet 6C
McCarthy. Brian—billet 6C.”
Before opening his door Ted looked at the short, wiry midshipman-behind him in the hall. He looked like a young Jimmy Cagney. “Are you Alan McKendrick, my new bunkmate?”
“I’m Max Miller. And you’re not Brian McCarthy, I’ll bet.”
“You’re right.” He held out his hand, laughing. “Ted Mendelsohn.”
So Miller, a reporter-on-leave “for the duration” from Newsweek, and Mendelsohn, the school newspaper editor at Chapel Hill, nurtured a special friendship. In the four months at midshipman school, they discovered a mutual appreciation for good writing, Chicago stride piano, South Bend girls on Saturday leaves, Robert Benchley, and good jazz. On the long bus ride back to South Bend from Chicago, where they had heard the Benny Goodman band on a Saturday leave, Ted lamented, “It took a Jew to hire Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson for a big band. But Goodman will never get a booking in my hometown of Atlanta.”
Max disagreed. “Nonsense. I’m Catholic, and I would have hired those guys. They’re the best in the business.”
“You’re a mixed breed, Miller. Doesn’t count. Only your old man was Jewish.”
Max grimaced. “He was also a prick who ran out on my mother and me. That’s why I got raised in the church.” He tapped Ted’s knee and looked quizzical. “Were you serious about Atlanta? Goodman’s the hottest swing band in the country. They could play anywhere.”
“Not with Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes. There’d be a riot. If you were born and raised there, you’d know it. And it’s not just Atlanta, Max. It’s the South. My family’s been there since Sherman burned the place. Believe me, I know.” He’d felt edgy and sad. “Being in that audience today, blacks, whites, it didn’t matter. We were just folks who wanted to hear great music.”
“How did your people get to Atlanta? Why Atlanta?”
“My great grandfather, Elijah Mendelsohnn, was a farmer, piss-poor, in Austria. He had a cousin who’d immigrated to Georgia and opened a pawnshop in Atlanta during Reconstruction. The cousin made money pawning rifles from the Union soldiers who were going home, and he told Elijah to come. And he came, with Grandma Sarah and two Guernsey breeding stock. He dropped the second “n” in Mendelsohnn to be more like a Yankee, and bought a small piece of land outside Atlanta. He started a tiny dairy that grew into Eli Dairy, a name that fit better on a milk wagon than Elijah. So for a hundred years there’s been an Eli Dairy.” He looked at Max. “The family expects me to run it after the war.”
“What are the odds of your doing it?”
Ted shook his head. “Same odds as you have for making Admiral.”
When they received their commissions as ensigns, USNR, Mendelsohn and Miller were assigned to train naval amphibious crews for the coming invasion of Europe. In the long, anxious days and nights preparing for D-Day in the English Channel they shared a longing for sleep, a desire to get the damn war behind them, and unsettling fears about what was waiting for them in Fortress Europe.
On D-Day they hit the invasion beaches together but saw each other only one more time before Ted was assigned to the Normandy beachhead and Miller got orders to return to his ship and proceed to New York to prepare for the invasion of Japan. From that point on, the friendship was nurtured by V-mails and letters.
One letter from Max caught up with Ted when he returned to England after the beachhead had been secured.
Teddy,
If you get to London again, look up Alex Hanson, an old buddy who’s working for Yank Magazine. I’m seeing his sister, Maggie, while my ship is in dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Terrific girl, Maggie. You’d like her. You ever coming home? It’ll be lonesome in the Pacific without you, pal.
Max
After VJ-Day, Max was discharged and was eagerly embraced again by Newsweek magazine. When Ted’s discharge papers came through, he found himself adrift in London, hungry to see beyond the beachheads and liberated ports of Fortress Europe that had been his truncated world since D-Day. He wanted to explore Rome, visit Vienna, cross the Alps, and, after the ennui of his goddam beachhead, enjoy Paree! And he wanted to write about this new world, not the one of marketing milk in Atlanta. When he met with Alex Hanson at Yank magazine, his stars started to come into alignment.
Yank was beginning its final months of publication, and was trying desperately to find the reporters needed to tell the liberation story. Hanson enthusiastically introduced him to the managing editor, and Mendelsohn was taken aboard. For six months he wrote a column for Yank that he called “Kilroy Was Here,” vivid recollections from the sailors and soldiers who had liberated the beaches and braved the killing thickets and hedgerows of France. When Hanson sent the reportage to his new brother-in-law, Max, in New York, Ted received his first American assignment as a reporter.
Teddy,
When you’re done with Fleet Street, Newsweek can use you to tell our readers what our kids are leaving behind. Your word pictures are as graphic as Bill Mauldin’s drawings in Stars and Stripes. We’ll pay you a hundred bucks a column, once a month. Tell us what you find in what’s left of Hitler’s Europe. Your press card will be in the next mail.
Max
With the first paycheck from New York, Ted bought an English bike and began the personal exploration of Europe he had promised himself. Within 36 hours the tour was nearly aborted when he swerved into a canal trying to avoid a hurtling Red Ball truck convoy outside of Saint-Lô. He was scrambling out of the slimy water, hauling his wrecked bike, when the driver of the last truck in the 30-truck convoy saw him and wheeled the loaded truck off the rutted highway. The black GI leapt from the cab. “You okay?” He extended his hand and helped the bleeding and shaken Mendelsohn to his feet. “Good reflexes, man! I’ve seen worse slides into second base. You sure you’re all right?”
Ted wiped the muck from his face and stared at the wrecked bicycle. “I made second safe, but my bike was out by a mile.” With disgust he tossed the bike back down in the weeds and sank, exhausted, to the roadbed. “Thanks for the hand, Mac. You got a load to deliver. I don’t want to keep you.”
The driver squatted beside him, exploring the cut on Ted’s forehead, trying to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief soaked from his canteen. “Doesn’t seem deep. I don’t think it’s much to worry about. I got a truckload of medic supplies, but you’re not going to need them.” He sighted down the empty and silent highway, seeing only the clouds of dust from his convoy that still lingered like ghosts in the dusk. “Gotta catch up with the trucks in Chartres and then I got a detail to deliver to a place called Dachau. You know Dachau?”
“Dachau? Never heard of it. But if you’re really going into Germany can I hitch a ride with you? I’ve been stuck in Normandy since D-Day and I’d like to see Hitler’s playground and the Supermen. The Krauts have just been mostly the invisible bastards who’ve kept me from going back to Atlanta.”
“Atlanta! You must be kidding. You’re going back to see my mammy in old Dixie? You really from Atlanta? I can’t believe that! I’m from the south side. Went to Carver High.” He grinned. “Don’t guess you went there, too. Wrong color, man. Name is Sam. Sam July.”
Ted took his extended hand. “Ted Mendelsohn.”
“Climb aboard. I can always use a back-up driver.” July threw the truck in motion. “We ought not be out here alone. The krauts love to surprise us.” He stared out the grimy windshield. “Watch the sky on your right.” When the convoy came into view he lit a cigarette and passed Ted the deck. “What did you do in Atlanta?”
“I worked for Eli Dairy.”
July slapped his hands against the wheel. “Best damn milk in all of Atlanta!” He turned and looked at Mendelsohn with a new interest. “Mendelsohn,” he said, “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn?”
Ted tried to smile. “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn.”
“My Grandpa Phineas on my mama’s side had a route with Eli, horse-drawn,” said July. “Horse’s name was Moses.” He laughed. “Used to let me feed Moses once in a while. He and Moses delivered for Eli for twenty-seven years.” He smiled, watching Ted out of the corner of his eye. “Hey, now you can deliver for me!”
“I’m not as dependable as Moses,” said Mendelsohn. “But I do land in the bulrushes.”
They were laughing as they rolled into Chartres.
From Yank magazine:
KILROY WAS HERE
There is no way, no way I know, for an American born in the twentieth century to really understand what I am seeing. This is the concentration camp of Dachau, a German invention. It was erected as the very first camp for political prisoners by Adolph Hitler in 1933. Just beyond these bullet-riddled and now deserted guard towers is an unrecognizable nightmare world, created by the same nation that blessed us with Bach, with Beethoven, with Mozart. There is no way.
What I enter now is a killing ground, an extermination camp with a still-warm crematorium, rail tracks still shivering from the last transport of the men, women, and children who have been delivered here to be murdered. In front of me is a rotting pile of 2300 human corpses, and the riddled bodies of wild carrion dogs who had been feeding on the flesh, shot by outraged GI’s when they broke into the camp, and the ashes of 400 innocents whose bodies were set on fire by the terrified Nazi guards as our troops stormed the gates. I wondered if some of them were Mendelsohns who never reached America. There is no way.
There was no way for General Eisenhower either. The unspeakable horror assaulted him when we liberated Dachau. In his fury he ordered our troops to go outside the camp and round up every German male in the village and march them slowly, one by one, through the entire slaughterhouse. The Nazi commandant was laid on the top of the rotting corpses, and the villagers were forced to spit upon him. Even for this five-star General, born in Abilene, Kansas, just before this century began, a man from a family rooted in Germany, there was no way. Dachau was such an obscenity that his very humanity felt assailed. No way to understand how his family’s spiritual home could be so profoundly defiled.
There was no way. There is no way.
The guards who survived recalled that during the forced showers, when the tens of thousands of children, women, and men were suffocated by gas, the loudspeakers in the camp would play Bach. And Beethoven. When the next trains arrived, they would play Mozart.
Mendelsohn was nearly overwhelmed by the human disaster he encountered everywhere, the cruel consequences of the Master Race mythology, the unspeakable barbarism it had unleashed. Dazed and shattered remnants of the Jews, Gypsies, and liberals who miraculously had escaped the fires of Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald filled every by-way and turgid refugee camp in the heart of Europe. It was a desolate and desperate journey into the dark heart of racism, and he wanted to capture that reality in his “Kilroy Was Here” columns that now had begun to appear in Newsweek. The heartbreaking powerlessness of the skeletal survivors seeded a fierce resolution. Mendelsohn knew he would resist the horror of racism whenever and wherever he found it.
On his last week on the continent, Max Miller had sent him a cable.
Teddy,
Soon as you can shake the clan after your visit home, there’s a chair for you at Newsweek. Folks here are eager to meet Kilroy because your stuff has been so alive and on-target. We got a lot to do, pal. Come.
Max
When he returned to Atlanta at the end of the year, Ted Mendelsohn was nearly a stranger to his family. Although they ravenously reclaimed him, he found the norms of Atlanta life stultifying and surprisingly difficult. He had changed, and Atlanta was changing. The city was racing into a buoyant postwar prosperity, reaching out to new suburbs and greenery. But beneath the euphoria, he could detect the old truisms of caste and race that he remembered from his childhood.
It was soon apparent that the subject of racism in any form was a source of irritation to his parents.
“Let the schwartze get the laundry, Teddy darling. You ought to rest.”
He reacted abruptly and loudly, startling his mother. “Christ, Mom, stop that! Clementine is not a schwartze. She’s an American who happens to be Negro!”
His mother’s eyes widened; she was clearly wounded by the sharpness in his rebuke. “All right, darling. I understand. I won’t use that word. I won’t say schwartze again.” She cocked her head, seeking to find the boy who had gone off to war, then smiled. “I should have my mouth washed out with soap.”
Ted looked tenderly at his mother. “When is the last time you told me that, mom? Probably when I called Paddy McElroy a lousy harp when he called me a kike after Boy Scout camp!”
She kissed him then and walked briskly to the door. “Get washed up, Teddy. We’re going to the club for dinner.”
Relieved and grateful to have him home safe, she brought her young veteran into the social swim of the synagogue and the country club, eager to have him meet the young men and women who could relaunch him into the community. “He’s very high-strung,” she confided to her husband that night as they were retiring. “He’s been through a lot.” But fatigued by the daily struggle to keep Eli Dairy running through the long war when all the young men had been gone, his father was ailing now. Ted watched with distress as proud Irving Mendelsohn’s strength seemed to be betraying him. “Help me, Teddy.” The words were so needy that Ted became more and more involved with Eli Dairy. In his first letter to Max Miller after returning stateside, he wrote of his dilemma.
Max,
The wandering Jew has returned to the family and to the South that still won’t hire Teddy Wilson. I’m trying to pass the buck of Eli Dairy to a younger cousin who likes it here, but my old man is a hard case who believes in tradition, responsibility, loyalty, early bedtime, and the separation of the races. Not sharing much of that, I’m not getting much traction. As to the separation of the races, that’s now a no-man’s-land where conversation dies. So keep my seat warm, but I won’t be able to use it until something changes.
Teddy
Irving Mendelsohn died late in December, and Max received another letter from Ted.
Max
Life gets in the way of life. So much to tell you when we get together. Arriving with my sweetheart, Julia, and will call you from Grand Central. Dust off the chair.
Ted
In the Spring of 1951, Julia Berg and Ted Mendelsohn were married in the living room of Max and Maggie Miller. “Your wedding present is a year’s subscription to Newsweek,” toasted Max with great ceremony. “Oh, and something I almost forgot to mention. Kilroy here is getting the Washington beat, no shabby beginning.” He grinned at the wide-eyed couple. “Newsweek thinks you and Washington will be a great fit, Teddy. We’re planning on keeping you real busy. And that should keep your bridegroom close enough, Julia honey, so he can pick up the groceries on the way home!”
For four years the Mendelsohns reveled in the excitement and glamour of the postwar capitol, only retreating to the quieter Maryland suburbs to replant their burgeoning family in a greener soil. The Kilroy of Yank magazine became the now bylined Ted Mendelsohn of Newsweek, leading the frantic bifurcated life of the commuter. Dogged and determined to create the nest that Julia had dreamed of since leaving Atlanta, he seemed to be constantly racing home for picnics, birthday parties, parents’ nights, and Little League games, all the demanding small-town happenings that seemed to overspill from the family calendar. Julia was radiant, intimately involved with the warp and woof of her kids’ lives. But the world of the newsroom was beginning to tremble with a new urgency of a “cold war” abroad and a roiling civil liberties conflict where charges of “Communist sympathizers” were erupting from Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Ted found the names of friends and colleagues on “black lists” that made them unhireable, his eagerness to get actively back on the scene and in the field became ever more at odds with his insulated life in the suburbs.
Max was nervously alive to the tremors, goading his reporters to “dig harder, dig deeper, and dig faster. You’re getting paid to keep us in front of the news, not sucking hind tit!” Max’s demands became the frantic focus of Mendelsohn’s life, and Mendelsohn’s idyll on the outskirts of the world skidded to an end. As segregation was being challenged in the schools and in the public accommodations of the South, as pray-ins and sit-ins exploded, and as the right of blacks to vote in elections were being asserted and denied, Mendelsohn’s bylines ricocheted from the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, and back to Washington, where the Senate was still debating whether to pass anti-lynching legislation.
Briefly back at home, he found Laurie to be shy in his presence and Richard unfamiliarly cool. Julia tried to be welcoming, but her exasperation at the changes in the normal routines he had forced on their lives could not be hidden.
“What has happened to you, Ted? What is happening to us? You missed Richard’s father-son banquet at the temple. Again. Last time it was sit-ins in Tennessee. This time it was Little Rock. Where the hell will you be when Laurie graduates? Damn it. It’s not fair!” She sat, desolate, on the edge of the bed, next to his half-empty Valpack. “It’s not what we planned, sweetheart.”
He nodded. “I know that, Julia. I feel like I’m tied to a runaway train. I’m on the cusp of something that I feel I’ve got to cover, to understand. It’s why I do what I do, darling. Why I’m not peddling milk. Why I’m a journalist. History is not waiting for me, and I find myself running like mad.” His voice broke. “Looking like a stranger to my daughter and missing father-son suppers with my kid, whom I adore. Feeling guilty. And not knowing what to do about it.”
Julia touched his hand. “I didn’t marry Lowell Thomas. I married you. I love you, but I spend most of my time missing you.” She rose and stopped at the door. “Your kids deserve more than that. Laurie does. Richard does. And so do I. Your job is becoming your wife, and the wife you married is becoming a goddam widow.” As she left the room the phone rang in the hall.
Julia answered. “It’s for you.” Her voice was brittle. “It’s your boss and good friend, Max.” She handed him the phone, turned on her heel, and went swiftly down the stairs.
Max’s voice was brisk. “The tickets for Oxford are at the airport, Teddy. Flight is at 7:40. Fly good and for Christ’s sake keep me in the loop. Oh, and say hi to Julia for me. She was off the phone before I had a chance.”
Everyone stood in the June sunshine in front of the Administration building, a puddle of humanity on the deserted Oxford, Ohio, campus. The talk was muted, people uneasy about what was about to take place. Kids smoked and shifted nervously, edging aside as Ted made his way over to Dale Billings, a young, black SNCC field worker who stood quiet and watchful on the edge of the lawn. “What are they going to do, Dale?”
Dale nodded toward a group of the staff who were carrying chairs from the dining hall into the center of the crowd. “They’ll set up a make-believe lunch counter,” Dale replied, squinting in the bright glare.
“Then they’ll integrate it.” He nudged Ted. “Like I was doing in Washington when we met. But this is about what happens when I do that in Mississippi.” He nodded toward a stocky young black who stepped into the clearing. “That SNCC kid is Jimmy Mack. He lives in the town of Shiloh in the Delta.”
Jimmy Mack held up his arms for silence, and Mendelsohn could hear the whir of the newsreel cameras that had arrived the day before. “This is the way you protect your body.” His voice was flat. “The vital parts of your body are your head, your neck, and your groin. You can protect them best by curling up like a baby, your legs together, your knees pulled up to protect your gut and your privates, your hands and arms shielding your head and the back of your neck.”
Mack bent forward, rolling into a fetal position, his arms lacing across his dark bent head and his hands cradling the back of his head and neck. The girl standing next to the reporter sucked in a deep breath. Mack rose from the lawn and led a volunteer from the crowd into the center. “Let me see you protect yourself.” The student assumed the position, and the young black pulled back his sneakered foot, gently tapping the exposed areas of the supine volunteer. “Your legs, your thighs, your buttocks, your kidneys, your back can take a kick or a billy club. So can your arms and your hands. Your head can’t. Your neck can’t. Your groin can’t. When your companion is being beaten or stomped while lying on the ground, you must protect him or her. You do it by shielding his head with your body. Your back can take it.”
Ted became aware again of the whir of the newsreel cameras. Everything would be recorded for the great spectator public except the nausea and the outrage of having to learn the art of protecting yourself from a Mississippi lynch mob or from American police who were waiting to assault you. When he turned to Dale Billings he saw that the young man was standing, arms folded, watching him.
Ted’s hand was shaking as he wrote in his notebook, seeking the words to convey to Max and Newsweek what he felt. When he looked across the tight circle of students there was not a sound. Their eyes stayed riveted on the tableau of a violence that until that moment had existed for them only in grade-B movies and tabloid spreads.
“It’s a nightmare theater. The loveliness of this June afternoon won’t be remembered by the students in the days and nights ahead in Mississippi. The sky is a delicate blue, and the sun-washed breeze is moving gently across the children who are play-acting on the green lawn. But it’s a nightmare theater.”
At the end of the week Ted called Max to let him know he was heading for Shiloh, Mississippi. “It’s going to be a hell of a story,” Max said. Then he added something very un-Max like. “Drive carefully Teddy. I’ve been to the Delta. You can bet your ass they know you’re coming.”