Tragedy and Hope: Memphis 1968

The news came over the radio, the words like so many bullets
exploding: Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot. Dr. King was
dead.

Agony erupted on Chicago's west side. More people were
killed, beaten, arrested. Long smoldering anger and frustration
burst into flames, in Chicago and in a dozen or so other cities.

April 4th, 1968. Three days later we were on our way to
Memphis, while national guardsmen patrolled through the
smoking rubble in the ghetto Mayor Richard J. Daley had
denied existed.

Dr. King had been in Memphis to lead a march of striking
sanitation workers when he was assassinated. The workers
were members of AFSCME (the American Federation of
State, County, and Municipal Employees) but their all Black
local 1733 was not recognized by the City of Memphis. They
averaged about $1.70 per hour with no benefits for gathering
the city's garbage, were given the oldest, most dilapidated
trucks to drive, worked under unsafe conditions- two men
had been killed because of faulty equipment in their truck-
and when the men were sent home because of inclement
weather, the white workers had been paid for a full day's
work, the Blacks for only a couple of hours.

The Mayor and City Council had shown some willingness to
negotiate a small pay raise, but Mayor Henry Loeb refused the
demand most important to the workers: recognition of the local
with dues check-off. Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King,
along with other SCLC leaders would be in Memphis on April
8th to carry on Dr. King's attempts to break the stalemate.

Our friend Bill, an organizer for AFSCME in Chicago, was
being sent by his union to the Memphis march. He invited Gil
and I and some others along, six of us in Bill's small station
wagon, taking the long, monotonous road the length of Illinois,
past silos and wheat fields and more of the same. We cut
through the corner of Mississippi where we found, after a
long stretch of countryside, a cafe in a little town with the
odd name of Festus, where we were served sandwiches
and canned soup.

It was late evening when we reached Memphis, unable to go
into the city because there was a curfew, the city cordoned
and patrolled by the National Guard. AfSCME was paying
for one motel room. We took the mattresses off the beds,
some of us slept on the box springs, others on the mattresses
on the floor.

The next morning we entered a grim, silent city, the streets
deserted, the shops shuttered, windows boarded over.
Violence had disrupted the first march, windows were broken,
those who advocated nonviolence dispersed. Dr. King had
returned to Memphis determined to lead the strikers in a
peaceful march which had been planned for the day after he
was assassinated. With fires still smoldering in a number of
cities, Memphis leaders apparently feared the worst. The
downtown area was closed down tight.

The only place we found for breakfast was near the bus
station which was still open and functioning. Bill studied
the menu and decided to order the grits. He said he'd
learned to eat grits when he'd been on assignment in the
South, but he could only eat them with sugar.

"If you put sugar on your grits," I told him, "They'll know
right away you're a yankee."

Bill was laughing when the waitress came for our orders.
"Is it true," he asked her, "that you can tell the yankees by
watching to see who puts sugar on the grits?"

"I don't know about that," the waitress said, her face hard,
"But they serve grits every day at the jail. Folks in there get
plenty of grits to eat."

We ate without talking much after that, no lingering over
coffee. The only parking place we could find near where
people were beginning to assemble was behind a Black-
owned funeral home. Some Black people parked near us
and were getting out of their car. An elderly woman
walked over to us.

"I thank y'all for coming," she said.

The gray stillness, with rain forecast, was broken by the
muffled sound of car doors closing as more arrived.

Bill took her hand. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm so sorry we had
to."

We walked down the crumbling sidewalk to the church where
the march was to start. This was the "Black Section" of town,
the houses small and crowded together.

Some of the men wore or carried signs that stated simply: "I
Am a Man".Although it was Monday, many were dressed as
if for church. Thousands were not going to work that day. A
small percentage was white, most of us from outside Memphis:
union leaders and organizers, civil rights workers and
clergymen, and some local white clergymen.

People filed into place quietly, speaking in subdued voices,
calm in spite of the threats: "The guard has been ordered to
shoot anyone who looks suspicious..." said the voice over a
portable radio.

A young Black woman next to me said nervously, "How do
you keep from looking suspicious? What if I grin..." She
spread her mouth, but her soft eyes were not smiling, "If I go
around grinning all the time, I'll sure enough look suspicious."

Some parade marshals came by with paper bags and asked
that anything resembling a weapon be turned over, "fingernail
files, umbrellas..." We could not give "them" any excuse to
bring charges against us was the message.

"Oh Lord," the young woman said, "I've got a pair of scissors
in my purse. They cost five dollars and I have to keep them."
She was taking a course in Home Economics at the college
and carried the scissors in her purse so she could use them at
home too. She hugged the purse against her breast.

As we waited for the march to begin, she told about the
insults of the white guardsmen when she and a girl friend
had been caught out minutes after the seven p.m. curfew.

A guardsman, rifle held upright, ordered them to halt.
"Where the hell do you gals think you're going?"

They were visiting a friend a block away. The guardsman
called them whores, said he could shoot them or screw them,
whichever he preferred, and ordered them home. They ran,
their hearts pounding, locked and bolted their door and leaned
against it for what seemed a long, long time before they dared
move away from it.

At last we began to move, eight abreast. People who had
been talking quietly hushed, and so we walked in silent
tribute to Dr. King and all he stood for, no sound but the sound
of marching feet. Through the downtown streets, dead and
quiet, the cross streets barred by double rows of national
guardsmen, rifles held out before them, bayonets pointing toward
us. All their faces were white. Young men who looked as if they
should be home tending the fields or punching a timeclock.

Only the sound of thousands of feet against the pavement.
Dr. King- and Medgar Evers, Chaney, Schwartz, Goodman,
Emmet Till, - and thousands of others before him, and after him
how many more? We marched through the area where the riot
was supposed to have occurred after he was gunned down-
half a dozen broken or boarded up windows, the rest blending
into the destruction from urban renewal. Some of the decrepit
houses were coming down- riot or urban renewal?

I have seen photographs of the King Memorial March showing
Coretta Scott King with her three oldest children, the
Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, Andrew
Young, and Rabi Abraham Heschel on the first row, the
required eight abreast, leading the march. I was so far behind
them that some of the speakers had finished speaking when I
and those around me reached the Plaza. Rosa Parks, Dr.
Spock, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, and a few others
addressed the rally. I have forgotten their exact words.

But I shall never forget when Coretta Scott King stood before
us, Her beautiful calm face, her soft voice as she spoke about
how her husband had often sent her to speak in his place when
he had appointments he could not keep.

"And now," she said, I have once again come in his place..."

The next day she would be following her husband's casket as
it was drawn through the streets of Atlanta by mules hitched to
a farm wagon.

Eight days after the march the strike was settled. The
Memphis City Council voted to approve the contract.
It included union recognition and dues check-off, a two-step
15 cents per hour raise, and provision for a grievance committee.

More Free Food

I had my second mess of poke sallet before the end of March.
There's an old saying that poke sallet saved the south after the
end of the Civil War when farmers were destitute, their crops
burned and their smokehouses emptied by union soldiers, with
marauding bands of rogues taking whatever the soldiers missed.

I let a few stalks go to seed, up to six feet tall with magenta stems
and great clusters of dark purple, almost black, berries, and now
there are little green shoots scattered about the lot where my house
burned last year.

Poke is reportedly toxic, so it must be picked early and prepared
correctly in order to be safely eaten. I pick only the smallest, newest
leaves and then parboil them. Let the pot boil for a few minutes after
all the bright green color is gone from the leaves, then pour into a
colander to drain, rinse thoroughly under running water, then return
to the pot to cook in a little fresh water until tender. I'm not sure
how much nutrition is left in the greens after all this- vitamins are
supposedly dissolved in cooking water- but the taste and texture
have been compared to asparagus, and they're safer to eat than
the spinach that sent all those folks to the hospital and killed a few
of them.

My grandmother cut the stalks into pieces, battered and fried
them, said it tasted a little like rhubarb. Fried rhubarb? The
Southern cook considers anything edible a candidate for
battering and frying. Grandma lived into her late '80's.

The berries are supposed to be especially toxic, yet the birds
eat them. The evidence is everywhere in the fall, purple splotches
on the grass and on any uncovered automobiles. It's actually the
seeds that are toxic and they pass through the bird whole,
punctuating the purple splotches.

The juice from the berries has been used as a substitute for ink.
I tried it once with a pen stock and could write very well with it,
but purple writing didn't appeal to me and there was the constant
dipping with the pen.

In her book A Modern Herbal, first published in 1931 and reprinted
by Dover Publications, Mrs. M. Grieve notes that the use of pokeberry
juice to color port wines in Portugal had to be discontinued because it
spoiled the taste. Poke (Phytolacca americana), she wrote, "is regarded
as one of the most important of indigenous American plants", with the
root used as an ingredient in remedies for rheumatism, headaches and
conjunctvitis, also as a "slow emetic and purgative with narcotic
properties," but she warns against an overdose.

Her herbal lore was undoubtedly garnered from the early American
physicians who acquired some of their medicinal knowledge from
Native American healers; poke was highly regarded by those tribal
medicine men.

I had planned to cook one more batch of poke before the leaves
get too large, but the Easter cold snap has killed it back, as well
as frost-blackening the new fig leaves and the lovely mounds of
lemon balm. I covered the garden bed of spinach, it will soon be
ready to pick, and all it cost was the seed at 10 cents per pack
bought at close-out prices last fall. The chickweed has bloomed,
no longer good and tender for salads until there's some new growth.
(It will die back completely during the summer and return to flourish
in the fall and through much of the winter.) But there are plenty of
dandelions, and I can mix some of the greens and flowers with the
spinach. And this summer there will be lots of fleshy orange daylily
flowers to add flavor and color to salads.

There's wild mustard on the Menlo lot, the smallest leaves good in
salads, the larger ones must be mixed with other greens and cooked.
And I have one more ten-cent pack of lettuce to plant.
I'll keep living off the land.

A Long Cold Winter

The reddish cast to these leaves causes them to look
more like blooms than new leaves

After the longest cold spell I can remember here, there are at last
signs of spring. Day after day the frozen ground felt like walking on
concrete. Bare earth spewed ice crystals. Ice froze at the edges of
the creek.Every morning the pasture behind this house was frosted
white.

We've had colder winter weather. There was the year the pipes
froze underground and we were without water until it warmed up
enough to thaw them. Only a few years ago the creek froze all the
way across, dispelling my belief that running water would not freeze.
The water still was moving underneath its thick coating of ice.

But those frigid days were interspersed with warmer ones, following
the pattern I'd known in the south since my youth. A few cold days,
then warm up and rain, repeated over and over so that one never
became accustomed to the cold, shivering and huddling in blankets
each time the temperature plunged again. This year it stayed cold.
The only time it warmed up was when the deadly tornadoes struck
to the south of us. We were lucky. We only got the heavy rains.

One morning there was snow. Two whole inches! Schools closed,
workers were told not to report to work. It was the first snow for
my great granddaughter who was almost five. She was awakened
early and sent out to play before it melted.

Two years ago there was an inch or so of snow high on the mountain.
A friend who lives at Cloudland told me people were driving up all
day, parking by the roadside, letting their children out to walk in the
snow.

I know, I know. I read about the ten-foot snows in upstate New York
and I lived through several Chicago winters, including 1967 and 1979
when snow paralyzed that city. But only a few inches of snow create
hazardous driving conditions here, for we have steep hills and a dearth
of equipment to deal with the snow.

It's cold enough here to snow all through the winter, but doesn't
because of the actions of the jet streams, the northern one seldom
dips down this far southward. It has happened. Everyone old enough
remembers the blizzard of '93. Every few years we have snow enough
to close all the roads. And we have ice storms that bring down power
lines and trees. But this past winter there was only the unremitting cold.

One day there was a flock of wild turkeys at the far end of the pasture
behind this house, and on another morning there were a dozen or so in
the front yard. Twice while I was home we were visited by a lovely blue
heron. I could gauge the depth of the creek by watching it stride through
the water with its funny backward kneebends.

Another, darker heron hung around all winter. I frequently saw it
hunched on the creek bank, long legs drawn up beneath it, long neck
tucked down, its dark, almost black feathers riffled by the wind, giving
it a tattered, decrepit appearance. It reminded me of the old men in
ragged overcoats who sat around on park benches in Chicago.
Sometimes it hung around the cows in the pasture, ducking down to
walk beneath them. The heron is a solitary creature, but perhaps this
one preferred companionship sometimes.

The long cold spell has created hardship in this poor county. The
prices of natural gas and propane have kept pace with the price of
gasoline for automobiles. The power companies' rate increases and
provision for "fuel recovery costs" to be passed on to the consumer
have meant spiraling bills for electrical heat. I used 100 gallons
more propane than last year in this small house at a cost of $1.89
per gallon. An office worker told me she and her husband had to
have their tank filled three times for a total cost of $1,500.00.
Chattooga is a poor county, and for the very poorest and for those
on fixed incomes it becomes a matter of Heat or Eat.

But at last, spring is at hand. Jonquils are blooming in almost
every yard and there is blue and white vinca and the little white
Star of Bethlehem. The chickweed blossoms are blue dots
sprinkled over its recumbent foliage and there is rue anemone on the
low wooded banks by the creek. The yard is carpeted with violets,
both purple and white and there are buttercups and dandelions.
It has rained again and turned cool again, but this time it surely will
not last for very long, although a freeze is forecast for the coming
weekend. .

I've planted something called mustard spinach and some regular
spinach in one of the garden beds here- they're almost large
enough to start picking- and a short row of sugar snap peas by
the fence that still stands on the Menlo lot. This year indeed I will
have rows of okra. This year I won't be telling myself how
ridiculous not to have it when with so little effort one can grow
enough to feed an army rather than paying a dollar or so per
pound for it.

Now the stark, bare limbs on the far side of the creek and in
the woods across the road are clothed with a pale lacy green
on their way to becoming the deep green wall that surrounds us
all summer, and today in Walmart a man bought two 25-pound
bags of wild bird seed. "They're coming back," he said, "and I've
got to take care of them."