Part 16 (1/2)

We've decided to stay in Selma. Tomorrow afternoon, there's a reenactment of the march to the Pettus Bridge, and tonight, at the local performing arts theatre, there is something billed as Selma Looking Back, Moving Forward. We talked about moving on. Maybe there'll be some celebrations in Georgia, too, I suggested.

”Not like this,” Wayne said, his voice hushed.

Wayne is not given to awe. His mind is quick, but dark. In Jackson, he stood at the fringe of the parade as if his joints had been wired too tightly together. Last night, after dinner at a Mexican restaurant where the clientele was both white and black, he balked at taking a shortcut through an alley to what looked like a park.

”What are you afraid of?” I asked, knowing the answer. Confrontation. Authority. A bullet in his back.

”Your kind is selected against,” he warned wryly. ”Guys like me survive. We avoid dark alleys.”

”Lamarckian!” I accused.

”Maybe you're right,” he admitted, and we walked down the alley to the park, which turned out to be a parking lot. I'm still not sure who got the last laugh.

”You know,” he says now as we have our coffee on the terrace, watching the yellowhammers flit among the shrubs on the riverbank, ”there's nothing to be afraid of. It's as safe here as anywhere.”

WE ARRIVE at the performing arts theatre early. The full t.i.tle of the evening's entertainment is Selma Looking Back, Moving Forward: Commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King. We should have known something was up by the ”Jr.” missing from his name. No true Yellowhammer ever makes that mistake.

A fresh-faced young white man with blond hair and a wide, gummy grin steps up to greet us in the lobby. He is wearing a Freedom Foundation T-s.h.i.+rt.

”Welcome,” he says, thrusting his hand at my chest.

”What's the Freedom Foundation?” I ask, thinking of Freedom Corner, of King's dream.

”We're from Denver, Colorado. We're here to work for reconciliation and renewal. We do counselling, for families and couples, communities.”

”Reconciliation along racial lines, you mean?”

”Yes.” The ebullient facade s.h.i.+fts. His face is earnest now. ”There is still a lot of healing to be done here.”

”And you've come from Colorado to do it?”

The sparkle returns. ”Yes, we have!”

The auditorium has been beautifully restored. On the stage, a bare-bones rock band is flanked by rows of teenagers wearing blue jeans and Freedom Foundation T-s.h.i.+rts. Of the sixty or so young people in the choir, only three are black, but they are in the front row. They look slightly dazed, as if they've been pulled in off the street at the last minute to provide a little local colour. The audience is spa.r.s.e, more than half white. I'm horrified that I've started to see the world this way, two-toned.

Two singers come forward to start the evening, a young black woman with a voice like Aretha Franklin, and a thin, anxious-looking white girl who sings in a high-pitched whine and slaps her blue-jeaned thigh not quite with the beat. They try to belt out old Sixties tunes, all the ”Baby!”s changed to ”Lord!”s. Someone clicks on a ghetto blaster and a young black girl in a diaphanous white robe does an Isadora Duncan routine to ”The Impossible Dream.” A white boy named Robert reads a piece about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ”I have a dream” speech, repeating one paragraph of the original, which is genuinely moving. Then the guest speaker, Cheyenne Webb, comes on to tell us how the civil rights martyr changed her life. I struggle to feel something, but she keeps getting in the way, referring again and again to Reverend Mark, the white Billy Graham clone sitting in the front row.

”You spoke like King, you reminded me of King. You are,” she says, ”the reincarnation of King.”

I WAKE the next morning still angry. What we were lured into last night was not the commemoration of a great man but a tent meeting, a group of fundamentalist Christians trying to convert a town in which there is already a church on every corner. I can't help wondering why they picked this place. Because it looks good on the letterhead to have a Freedom Foundation with a ministry in Selma, Alabama?

We go out for a bird walk and see trees full of cardinals and cedar waxwings and one Carolina wren. We ask Veronica at the desk to recommend a breakfast spot, then get caught up reading a plaque devoted to the Reverend James Reeb, the white minister who answered a call by Dr. King to come help in Selma. After eating at a black cafe, he took a wrong turn and ended up near a white club, the Silver Moon, where he was beaten. He later died from a fractured skull.

We spend part of the day at the National Voting Rights Museum. Sam, who greets us, explains that the museum is a people's project, the story of all the ”regular folks” who made the movement what it was. One entire wall-the ”I Was There” wall-is feathered with Post-it note messages from people who were at the b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday march, at the Selma to Montgomery march, at all the other marches without names.

I was seven months pregnant on the bridge on b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday. A trooper who saw that I was pregnant deliberately tried to run me down with his horse.

I was beaten on the bridge.

I was a State Trooper in 1965.

I have no words to express. It's all on the inside of my heart and it hurts.

The next room is panelled with FBI and police photographs chronicling the marchers, defiant as they first approach the bridge, grim as they walk to Montgomery flanked by National Guardsmen charged with clearing the bridges of bombs, the woods of snipers. (They found nothing, but at least they kept the spitters, rock throwers, and insult hurlers at a distance.) In the centre are the plaster footprints and shoes of those who made the walk. In another room, the plain sweater, cloth shoes, and rolled nylons of Marie Foster, who walked the entire fifty miles, never once accepting a rest ride. Everywhere, photos of King and excerpts from his speeches. A white girl vacuums a corner where a KKK exhibit is a work-in-progress. In the tiny gift shop, reproduction signs are for sale-White Only and Colored-and cotton bags: ”Hands That Pick Cotton Can Pick Presidents.”

”We should get one.”

”No,” Wayne says flatly in a tone that tells me not to press it.

The museum is housed in the former meeting place of the White Citizens Committee, formed by the owners of businesses and factories, bank managers and bosses who decided together that if a black man tried to register for the vote, his services would no longer be needed, his house was no longer available to rent.

I ask Sam, ”How did they justify it? What did they tell themselves?”

A white woman standing nearby snorts. ”The same things they said to themselves about women when they refused them the vote.”

”A lot of people thought, we get the vote, everything will change,” Sam says. ”It wasn't like that. It's still not like that.” He tells us about Sheriff Clark, who is now in a nursing home. Sam visited him a few months ago. ”'I was just doing my job,' that's what he told me,” Sam says. ”'I could have arrested a lot more and I didn't.'”

Sam reports the conversation without judgment. ”Everyone is part of this story,” he says. ”We want all of it here.”

”They should have a portrait of York here,” Wayne says as we leave. ”William Clark's slave in 1805. He was the first black man to vote in America. Then again,” he adds, ”there probably is no portrait of York.”

All day we've been trying to find out about tomorrow's parade to the bridge. Veronica laughs every time I ask. She stands with her back slightly arched, as if ready at any minute to lift her face to the sun, which she does when she laughs, which is very often. At one point, I ask if she has Sat.u.r.day's paper; maybe there was a mention of the time and gathering place there.

”Oh, we don't have no Sat'day paper,” she laughs. ”Sunday we have. By Sat'day ever'body already knows what's goin' on.”

Everybody but us.

I ask the housekeeper when she comes to change the bed linen. I can't shake the feeling that maybe the reason no one will tell us when the parade starts is that we're not wanted there.

”Are others welcome at the parade?” I ask tentatively.

”Why, sure.”

”I mean, it's your celebration. Re-enactment, I mean.”

”Oh,” she says, as if she's never thought of it like that before.

”I was just a white girl up in Canada, but it meant a lot to me.”

”It did, it did,” she nods. ”It changed everything.”

She pauses to pa.s.s a hand over the bedspread, which does not need smoothing. There is no smile in her eyes, no warmth in her voice.

”Y'all come,” she says finally. ”Everybody's welcome. We've had enough of that other.”

WALTER Hill, the guest speaker at Tabernacle Baptist Church, is a thin, intense black man from nearby Mosses, Alabama. According to the program handed to me as I entered the church, he is a native of Chicago who moved to this state when he was twelve, ”received his baccalaureate degree from Miles College, and is now matriculating at Alabama State University in Educational Policy and Leaders.h.i.+p.” There are about thirty people in the congregation, including a half-dozen of the white do-gooders from Denver we saw at the revival meeting last night. We sit as far from them as we can get. There is an all-male choir at the front of the church. A succession of speakers has mounted the low dais in front of the choir to address us, each of them veterans of the 1965 march. The presiding pastor, Roosevelt Goldsby, has announced the theme of the day's service: ”Remembering the Man and the Legend,” the man, of course, being Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When Mr. Ronald Peoples has read the scripture, Samuel C. Lett has led us in prayer, and Mrs. Doris c.o.x has explained the significance to the voters' rights movement of Tabernacle First Baptist, where both of the historic marches began and where in March 1965 hundreds of black protesters gathered despite the local bylaw prohibiting more than three blacks to a.s.semble to talk about civil rights, Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson introduces Walter Hill and Hill's topic, ”Pharaoh, Let My People Go.”