My civil rights march, 1965

                Out of the corner of my eye a glint of light that I almost dismissed as a corneal dysfunction or some sort of aberration moved upwards. Perhaps it was reflected sunlight bouncing around from the store front windows or the passing motorcycles during the early afternoon sun. It appeared only once in my peripheral vision and seemed to be moving in a steep arch, somewhat towards me. It was hard to see because the street was crowded and people were screaming from the side walk, chaos, confusion. When I dream about this incident I see the coke bottle traveling upward tumbling end over end in exaggerated slow motion. From the time I saw the glint of light a few seconds passed before I heard a loud crack; an almost sickening thud of something hard smacking against flesh just to my right.  A coke bottle hit the black man in the head who was walking next to me. The grip of his hand loosened and slipped out of mine. He went down like a sack of potatoes. A geyser of blood spurted from the hair line on his scalp. Kneeling down beside him I quickly looked in the direction of the sidewalk where I assumed the thrown bottle had come from looking for someone to blame. Clustered together laughing was a group of boys I had gone to military school with. One of them had played football for the college team and had surely thrown the bottle. He always seemed like a nice enough guy at that time and in that other place. Who would have ever guessed he was capable of assault with a coca cola bottle on a stranger? Coming from a family affluent enough to have a son at military school one would think he would have known better. That was just not the case at that point in time in the deep south. This was in 1966 and just a few years before at the military school I attended with this group of boys a huge cheer rang out from the parade ground where the entire battalion was marching when it was announced on November 22, 1963 that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. I turned twenty years old on this very same day. Announcements were quickly and adamantly made over the intercom that all celebrations had to immediately cease otherwise great penalties would be imposed on the student body and everyone would be very sorry. President Kennedy had become the focus for all the racist hatred that stirred the people in the south. The president became a target for the frustrations of the many angry southerners who were experiencing their lives being irrevocably changed in so many different ways. Caught up in a maelstrom of social upheaval that swept them away into uncharted territory; they blamed who they could. The children inherited their hatred at parental feet. As he twig is bent.....

               The start of the march was from the First African Baptist church in downtown Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A girl I was in the art department with at the University of Alabama came to my studio and insisted I go with her to march in a parade in downtown Tuscaloosa.  She said, “Anyone can march in the parade and it will be fun!” There was no mention of it having anything to do with civil rights or flying coke bottles. She was somewhat of a free spirit and thinking it might be interesting to march in a parade I went along. Probably I was invited because I had one of the few cars in the circle of friends I associated with and nobody wanted to walk downtown.  A group of us went; arriving at the church I lined up with the group of participants, most of which were black. I thought nothing of it and prepared to walk holding hands with the girlfriend I had come with. One officious looking black man pulled me away from the girl and guided me between two black men. The man on my right grasped my hand and we started to walk forward. I was curious as to why I had to hold hands between these two black men instead of my girl friend but still I continued. Later I realized he wanted the few whites to be spread out and not so clustered together so that we would look more numerous; this I can only suppose. I had never held hands with a black man (or any other man before, other than my father or perhaps one of my brothers) and the sensation was unsettling. His hands were exceedingly rough and he seemed not to like holding hands with me any better that I did with him.

                It is not as though I didn’t sympathize with the southern blacks and their plight. I did. Growing up in south Alabama I was raised with Negroes who worked in our house most every day of my life as cooks, housekeepers and babysitters.  I knew one in particular who was, I suppose my nanny. Her name was Bera and I truly loved her as much as any member of my family. She was there for me during the first 12 years of my life. She worked for my parents as far back as I can remember. She and I went fishing together and I cannot express how much I cared about her even though she was a hopeless alcoholic. Bera was discharged by my parents after falling out in the middle of the kitchen floor screaming about huge spiders on the ceiling one morning. There were of course, no spiders only a case of the D.T.s. That was the end of Bera’s service for our family. I did go find her one time after I was home for the weekend from college and saw her for a brief visit. She seemed as she always did and I felt that she still loved me.

                I wish I could say that I stayed and finished the civil rights march but I would be telling less than the truth. As retroactively noble as that would be, my parents would have never understood and would have probably disowned me for even being there. Controversy was something they never handled well. There was also the possibility that the recipient of the flying coke bottle was suppose to be me. Had the military school boy seen me in t he parade and thrown the bottle at me instead of the black man at my elbow? He would have certainly hated me for being in that parade. Returning immediately to my car I noticed splattered blood spots on my shirt. I do not know what happened to the man that was hit by the coke bottle and there is now no way to find out. I do not know if Martin Luther King was there for the march but I heard later that Bobby Shelton, the grand imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan was.  In the perspective of many, many years it is obvious he was neither grand, imperial nor was he a wizard. He was just an ignorant redneck, filled with hate and bigotry. I was a coward who left when the going got tough and the coke bottles started to fly. The boy from military school who threw the bottle probably never felt any recriminations for his deed. I did!

                Years later I was teaching in Columbia, Mississippi and my future wife was teaching in New Orleans; I went down for the weekend. One night while I was there we went for a night of celebration in the French Quarter. It was the occasion of the Sugar Bowl (Georgia Bulldogs vs. Arkansas Razorbacks, I believe) around New Years day and just for fun we went down to watch the activities. As we walked in a throng of celebrating people crowded onto Bourbon Street I saw a glint in the night sky and realized someone had thrown an empty beer bottle as high into the air as they could. It too came down (as gravity would have it) and cracked a man in the top of the head. He went down like a sack of potatoes as his female companion screamed hysterically.  When I, like everyone else pushed over to see what had happened his head was a geyser of blood, evacuating the wound at an alarming rate. His female companion cradled him in her arms sobbing and whimpering.

            Now as a man certainly in the last stages of what has unexpectedly become a long life; I am still expecting the see a third glint of light rising up towards heaven, sparkling in the sun. It will be coming from the hand of a thoughtless person and I fully expect it to be headed for me. It will be the third thing finally closing a paragraph of an inexplicable group of things that happened at different points and different places in my life. I cannot fully explain how or why.

*This was not the 1964 march the First African Baptist church in downtown Tuscaloosa that resulted in many arrests and much damage in Tuscaloosa but two years later.

Afternoons on the reading Porch

                There are things in life a person just cannot resist, sex, money, Food, drugs, alcohol, fame and a million other things I will not even try to illuminate. One of those things for me is an old single bed out on the front screened in porch of our house. It really is not the front porch anymore because what used to be the front of the house is now the side. What once was the side of the house is now the front. The bed too is not really a single bed because we bought it extra long for our oldest son who grew beyond our wildest expectations ultimately reaching six feet and four and a half inches tall. He never liked to have his feet sticking past the end of his childhood single bed, for some reason he thought he looked like Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies, way over grown and not fitting into his now miniature bed. Not that any of this matters at all because really it has nothing to do with anything I am planning to write down in this story. In fact I am pretty sure this is not even a story. Random thoughts do not necessarily combine and become a story. In fact the bed itself may not even be the thing I am addicted to. The space the bed occupies may be the thing that appeals to me even before the bed. The porch it rests on is about eight feet wide and thirty five feet long; I know, nothing particularly unusual about that. It may also be the fact that just beyond the screen of the porch is a large overgrown bottle brush buckeye shrub, maybe a small tree. In the middle of July the tree is attacked by every manner of nectar eating creature for miles around seeking the tall nectar filled inflorescence the tree produces each July. The honey bees, the yellow jackets, the wasp, the hornets and many other insects as well as a rainbow of humming birds swarm the air surrounding this large shrub/tree working it from daylight to dark. Even after dark if you turn the spotlight on there are hundreds of night flying moths working the tree busily. Beyond the tree is a bevy of assorted trees and shrubs as the land slips downward to a small creek.

            A year or so ago I lay in this very spot almost asleep with the breeze from the ceiling fan washing over me. In a somewhat sedated state I listened to the quiet sounds coming from just beyond the porch. The lulling sound of the rustling creek lured me ever closer to sleep. It was just at the edge of our property, briskly rushing down the mountain towards the Toccoa River, Lake Blue Ridge and then to Tennesee. The soft clicking of the poplar leaves in the adjacent trees added to the softness of the afternoon. Nothing could have been more bucolic and perfectly tranquil, lying on the napping bed on the front screened in porch reading my latest book. Sleep would over take me as surely as the marauding squirrels would steal the sunflower seed from the bird feeder hanging just outside the screen wire. I noticed the silent hornets dodging around the hummingbird feeder as my eyes slowly closed. Sleep claimed me in its dark arms and unconsciousness enveloped me. I slept. 

            After some time of sleeping soundly I dreamed I was in heavy traffic coming through Atlanta on I-75 in my Jeep and someone behind me was insistently blowing the horn of their car. It was very regular and extremely annoying, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The sound slowly roused me from a sleep that felt almost drug induced. Coming to I realized the horn being blown so regularly was not a car horn at all but an insistently barking dog. It was Jesse, my Dalmatian and he was hysterically barking as he usually did when a timber rattlesnake or a copperhead was in the vicinity. Groggily I rolled myself off the bed and started for the door. The book I was reading fell onto the small table by the bed and continued on its way to the floor overturning a half finished glass of sweet iced tea on its way. Looking through the screen and dense foliage I could see Jesse’s white spotted body dodging and lunging through the bushes, definitely in the pursuit of something. I saw no snake as the intermittent foliage was in the full flush of spring. I knew I had to go investigate anyway. Having no direct exit from the screened porch I walked through the house to the front door (which used to be the side door) and went down to the front yard, grabbing a hoe propped against the railing on my way just in case it was a poisonous snake that was causing all the commotion.

            Rounding the vegetation filled space just beyond the porch I saw Jesse jerkily attacking something. It took me a minute to realize that it was no snake but a fawn with spots covering his small body. Bambi! It was somehow hung in the fence surrounding the vegetable garden. The lumps on his head where antlers would eventually grow had been pushed with such force as he struggled to escape the dog that they had become wedged between two of the stiff rectangular parallel wires in the fence. Grabbing a handful of dirt I threw it into Jesse’s face. He briefly ceased his barking and retreated a few steps shaking his head. I looked at the small deer hung in the fence and tried to understand just what had happened. The bony humps had spread the rectangular wire opening with such force that they briefly allowed the apex of his head to slip through the small opening. They sprang back after that portion of his head passed through and held him fast in the grip of the fence, within Jesse’s reach. Moving to the head area of the now hysterical deer I carefully grasp his neck and pulled gently trying not to frighten him any more than he already was. He could not be extricated from the fence’s unexpected embrace by my hands no matter how hard I pulled. He would certainly be killed by the dogs or by shock if I could not remove him. Finally in desperation I moved to the back end of the small animal’s body and grabbed him by his spotted rump and began to pull. As it turned out this was not such a wise position to occupy on an animal with hooves, no matter how small he was. What followed is somewhat of a blurry conjecture to me but piecing it together following the incident this is what I assume happened. Suddenly and without warning the small apparently defenseless animal kicked me in the middle of the chest with such force that it propelled me backward into the adjacent bushes. This I assume because of the two perfectly round purple bruises I found in the middle of my chest later that afternoon, one on each side of my sternum. 

            Not knowing just how long I had been lying in the bushes I looked over at the place where the deer had been hung in the fence. He was gone and Jesse was sitting there looking at me intently. There was no sign of the deer, unless you count the dark purple stained places in the middle of my chest. Returning to the front porch I had visions of the Road runner and Wile E. Coyote and had a great deal more sympathy for him than I had ever felt before. Also that Walt Disney “Bambi” movie took on a whole different meaning for me and should be re-titled…."Bambi, the beast from Hell" or ”Bambizilla” or something more appropriate and not so misleading.

Many afternoons when I nap o n the porch I dream. Sometimes these dreams make perfect sense to me and even foretell hints about things pertinent to my life. Sometimes not!

             During one afternoon’s dream I was standing in the middle of a large group of singers (most of them very attractive women with their breasts pushed way up to an unreasonable high position) elaborately dressed in highly unusual costumes, sequins, tassels, lots of makeup  etc. Their clothing was plastic, shiny, stiff and brightly colored with wide collars and stripped pants. The group standing around me was on what appeared to be a revolving stage, carousel like. The music was from a calliope and very loud. The people in the chorus and I danced, sang, jumped and gesticulated in unison.  We sang the following song.

“In school I met a girl whose name was Nina and everybody said she came from Louisiana. She sang like a bird and she played the piano. Art was her major and French was her minor. She really used to love it when I licked her vagina. How I really loved that girl but she up and moved to China.”

            Nina was pronounced like the number nine with an ‘uh’ on the end. Louisiana was pronounced distinctly with five syllables. At the end of the words Nina, Louisiana, piano, minor and China the entire choral group and I stamped our foot twice, quite loud and it rocked the moving stage. This pattern continued and repeated until I was exhausted and sweating in my sleep. I woke up, startled for some reason, got up and wrote the song down before I forgot it. There were many strange words and misspellings when I looked at it later that afternoon.  The rest of the afternoon the song ran through my head and would not stop. The dream almost started up again last night but I made myself get out of the bed and wake up so I wouldn’t have to do all that dancing and singing again. I was still tired from the previous afternoon. Besides I thought I smelled smoke.

What can this mean?

tbd

EVERYTHING CHANGES