* * *
SPRING 1968 (IV). What he was watching was a revolution in miniature, Ferguson decided, a revolution in a dollhouse. SDS’s objective was to force a showdown with Columbia that would reveal the administration to be exactly what the group claimed it was (intransigent, out of touch with reality, a small piece in the large American picture of racism and imperialism), and once SDS had proved that to the rest of the students on campus, the ones in the middle would come over to their side. That was the point: to eliminate the middle, to create a situation that would thrust everyone into one camp or the other, the fors and the againsts, with no room left in between for waffling or moderation. Radicalize was the term used by SDS, and in order to achieve that goal they had to behave with the same stubbornness as the administration and never give an inch. There was intransigence on both sides, then, but because the students were powerless at Columbia, SDS’s intransigence came across as a strength, while the intransigence of the administration, which held all the power, came across as a weakness. SDS was goading Kirk into using force to clear the buildings, which was the one thing everyone else wanted to avoid, but the spectacle of hundreds of policemen storming the campus was also the one thing that was bound to provoke horror and disgust in the ones who were still in the middle and turn them to the students’ cause, and the dumb administration (which turned out to be even dumber than Ferguson had supposed—as dumb as the czar of Russia, as dumb as the king of France) fell right into the trap.
The administration stuck to its hard line because Kirk saw Columbia as a model for all other universities in the country, and if he caved in to the students’ preposterous demands, what would happen elsewhere? It was the domino theory writ small, the same theory that had put half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, but as Ferguson had discovered in his first days of living in New York, dominoes was a game played on milk crates and folding tables by Puerto Ricans on the sidewalks of Spanish Harlem and had nothing to do with politics or the running of universities.
SDS, on the other hand, was making it up as it went along. Every day was packed with unexpected developments, every hour felt as long as a day, and to do what had to be done required absolute concentration as well as an openness of spirit found only in the best jazz musicians. As head of SDS, Mark Rudd became that jazz man, and the longer the occupation of the buildings went on, the more impressed Ferguson was by how fluidly Rudd adapted to each new circumstance, by how quickly he could think on his feet, by his willingness to talk about alternative approaches to each crisis as it came up. Kirk was rigid, but Rudd was loose and often playful, Kirk was a military band leader conducting John Philip Sousa numbers, but Rudd was onstage doing bebop with Charlie Parker, and Ferguson doubted that anyone else from SDS could have done a better job as spokesman for the group. By the night of April twenty-third, Ferguson had already forgiven Mark for the Dear Grayson–motherfucker fuck-up, which, by the by, had not offended people in the way he had thought it would—student-people, that is, pro-SDS and anti-administration students—which in turn had led Ferguson to ask himself what he knew about such things anyway, for not only had the words not offended people, they had become one of the rallying cries of the movement. It wasn’t that Ferguson felt happy when he heard masses of students shouting out the phrase Up against the wall, motherfucker!, but it was clear to him that Mark had a better sense of what was going on than he did, which explained why Rudd was leading a revolution and Ferguson was only watching it and writing about it.
Swarms of people on the campus at all hours, even in the middle of the night, round-the-clock swarms for an entire week, then intermittent swarms during the month that followed, and whenever Ferguson thought about that time later, the chaos that began on April twenty-third and lasted until commencement day on June fourth, the swarms were always what came back to him first. Swarms of students and professors wearing different colored armbands, white ones for the faculty (who were trying to keep the peace), red ones for the radicals, green ones for the supporters of the radicals and the six demands, and blue ones for the jocks and right-wingers, who had named themselves the Majority Coalition and held angry, clamorous demonstrations to denounce the other demonstrations, launched an attack on Fayerweather Hall one night to evict the occupiers (they were repulsed after much pushing and shoving), and formed a successful blockade around Low on the final day of the sit-ins to prevent food from entering the building, which led to more shoving and punching and some bleeding scalps. As might have been expected from a university of Columbia’s size (17,500 students counting all graduate and undergraduate divisions), the faculty was split into numerous factions, ranging from full support of the administration to full support of the students. Various suggestions were put forward, various committees were formed, a new approach to disciplinary procedures, for example, the tripartite commission, which advocated combined adjudication by equal numbers from the administration, faculty, and student body, and the bipartite commission, which advocated a panel of faculty and students only with no members from the administration, but the most active committee was the one that called itself the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, which was largely composed of younger professors, who held long and frantic meetings over the next days searching for a peaceful solution that would give the students most of what they wanted and get them out of the buildings without having to call in the police. All of their efforts failed. It wasn’t that they didn’t come up with some good ideas, but every one of those ideas was blocked by the administration, which refused to compromise or back down on any of the demands concerning discipline, and thus the faculty learned that they were just as powerless as the students were, that Columbia was a dictatorship, mostly benevolent until now but veering ever closer to absolutism, with no interest in reforming itself into anything that resembled a democracy. Students came and went, after all, faculty came and went, but the administration and the board of trustees were eternal.
Columbia wouldn’t hesitate to call in the cops to drag the white students out of the buildings if necessary, but the black students in Hamilton Hall posed a more delicate and potentially more dangerous problem. If the police attacked them or handled them roughly while they were being arrested, the spectacle of white-on-black brutality could ignite the people of Harlem and send them rushing onto the campus in retaliation, and then Columbia would find itself at war with a vengeful black mob intent on ripping apart the university and burning Low Library to the ground. Given the anger in Harlem following Martin Luther King’s murder, violence and destruction on such a massive scale was more than just an irrational fear, it was a distinct possibility. A police action to expel the trespassers in the five buildings was planned for the night of the twenty-fifth/twenty-sixth (the same night Mathematics Hall was taken), but when undercover plainclothesmen started banging their nightsticks on the heads of the white-armband professors gathered in front of Low to protect the demonstrators inside, Columbia backed off and canceled the operation. If this was what the Tactical Patrol Force would do against the whites, what were they not prepared to do against the blacks? The administration needed more time to negotiate with the SAS leaders in Hamilton so its faculty emissaries could work out a separate peace that would spare the university from a Harlem invasion.
As for the white students, the general feeling in the Spectator office was that SDS had already gained the upper hand on the two most important issues that had launched the protest, for it was almost certain now that the university would detach itself from IDA and that the gymnasium would never be built. The students in the occupied buildings could have walked out unharmed at that point and declared victory, but the four other demands were still on the table, and SDS refused to budge until all of them had been met. The most controversial item was the one about amnesty (that a general amnesty be granted to the students participating in this demonstration), which turned out to be something of a conundrum for most people on campus, even members of the Spectator staff, who were almost unanimously sympathetic to the occ
upiers in the buildings, for if, as SDS was claiming, the university was an illegitimate authority that had no right to punish them, how could they expect that same illegitimate authority to exonerate the protesters for what they were doing? As Mullhouse jokingly put it to Ferguson one afternoon in his pretend cowboy twang, It’s a real doggone little head-scratcher, ain’t it, Arch? Ferguson scratched his head in response and smiled. You’re damned right it is, he said, and unless I’m mistaken, that’s precisely what they want it to be. Their reasoning is absurd, but by holding out on a point they know they can’t possibly win, they force the administration’s hand.
To do what? Mullhouse asked.
To call in the cops.
You can’t be serious. Nobody can be that cynical.
It’s not cynicism, Greg. It’s strategy.
Whether Ferguson was right or wrong, the cops were eventually called in at the close of the seventh day of the occupations, and at two-thirty in the morning on April thirtieth—an hour, as someone pointed out, when Harlem was asleep—the bust began. One thousand helmeted troops from the New York City riot police fanned out across the campus as a thousand onlookers stood in the chill and the damp of that eeriest of all black nights while others swarmed and howled and chanted No Violence! at the police and the blue-bands cheered them on and the white-bands and the green-bands tried to block the T.P.F. from entering the buildings, and the first thing Ferguson noticed was the animosity that existed between the police and the students, a mutual resentment that had nothing to do with the white-black antagonisms everyone had feared but white-white class hatred, the privileged students and the bottom-rung cops, who saw the Columbia boys and girls as rich, spoiled, anti-American hippie brats, and the professors who supported them were no better, pompous anti-war intellectual radicals, Reds, the rancid poisoners of young minds, so first they took care of evacuating Hamilton and getting the blacks out as smoothly as they could, and because there was no resistance from the proud, tightly organized students of Malcolm X University, who had voted not to resist and calmly let the police escort them through the tunnels under the building to the paddy wagons that were parked outside, not one punch was thrown at them, not one nightstick cracked down on any of their skulls, and Columbia, through no efforts of its own, managed to escape the wrath of Harlem. By then, the water supply to the other buildings had been shut off, and one by one the T.P.F. and their plainclothes undercovermen set about clearing Avery, Low, Fayerweather, and Math, where the occupying students were hurriedly reinforcing the barricades they had erected behind the doors, but each building had its own battalion of white-bands and green-bands in front of it, and they were the ones who got the worst of the pounding, the ones who were clubbed and punched and kicked as the cops plowed through them with crowbars to force open the locks and then charge in to bust up the barricades and arrest the students inside. No, it wasn’t Newark, Ferguson kept telling himself as he watched the police go about their business, no shots were being fired and therefore no one was going to be killed, but just because it wasn’t as bad as Newark didn’t mean it wasn’t grotesque, for there was Alexander Platt, associate dean of the college, being punched in the chest by a cop, and there was philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, he of the white sneakers and unraveling sweaters and zinging ontological quips, being banged over the head by a nightstick as he stood guard at the back entrance of Fayerweather Hall, and there was a young reporter from the New York Times, Robert McG. Thomas Jr., showing his press card as he mounted the stairs in Avery Hall and being ordered to quit the building, at which point he was slugged in the head by a cop using a pair of handcuffs as brass knuckles, then shoved down the stairs and hit with a dozen billy clubs as he tumbled to the bottom, and there was Steve Shapiro, a photographer from Life magazine, being punched in the eye by one cop as another cop smashed his camera, and there was a doctor from the volunteer first-aid crew dressed in doctor’s whites being thrown to the ground, kicked, and dragged off to a paddy wagon, and there were dozens of male and female students being jumped by plainclothesmen hiding in the bushes and having their heads and faces clunked by saps, sticks, and pistol butts, dozens of students stumbling around with blood pouring from their scalps and foreheads and eyebrows, and then, after all the demonstrators in the buildings had been pulled out and carted away, a phalanx of T.P.F. warriors began systematically moving back and forth across South Field to clear the campus of the hundreds who remained, charging into crowds of defenseless students and pummeling them to the ground, and there were the mounted police on Broadway going at full gallop after the lucky ones who had eluded the clubs in the campus assault, and there was Ferguson, trying to do his job as reporter for his humble student rag, being hit on the back of the head by a billy club wielded by yet another undercoverman dressed to look like a student, the same head that had been stitched up in eleven places four and a half years earlier, and as Ferguson fell to the ground from the impact of the blow, someone else stomped on his left hand with the heel of a boot or a shoe, the same hand that was already missing its thumb and two-thirds of its index finger, and when the foot came down on him Ferguson felt the hand must have been broken, which turned out not to be true, but how it hurt, and how quickly it swelled up afterward, and how much, from that moment on, he came to despise cops.
Seven hundred and twenty people arrested. Nearly one hundred and fifty injuries reported, with untold numbers of unreported injuries as well, among them the knocks that had been delivered to Ferguson’s head and hand.
The editorial in that day’s Spectator had no words in it—just the masthead followed by two blank columns bordered in black.
* * *
SPRING 1968 (V). On Saturday, May fourth, Ferguson and Amy finally sat down and talked. Ferguson was the one who insisted on it, and he made it clear to her that he didn’t want it to be a conversation about his wounds or Amy’s arrest with her fellow occupiers in Low, nor were they going to discuss the general strike against Columbia that had been declared on the evening of April thirtieth by a coalition of red-bands, green-bands, and moderates (the SDS strategy had worked) or dwell for a single moment on the big things that were starting to happen in their adored, fiercely remembered Paris, no, he said, for one night they would forget about politics and talk about themselves, and Amy reluctantly gave in, even though she could think about little else but the movement now, what she called the euphoria of the struggle, and the electric awakening that had transformed her after six days of communal living in Low.
In order to avoid a potential shouting match in the apartment, Ferguson suggested they go to a neutral site, a public site, where the presence of strangers would stop them from losing control of themselves, and because they hadn’t been to the Green Tree in over two months, they decided to return to Yum City for what Ferguson supposed would be the last meal they ever had together for the rest of their lives. How happy Mr. and Mrs. Molnár were to see their favorite young couple walk through the door of the restaurant, and how accommodating they were when Ferguson asked for a rear corner table in the back room, the smaller, slightly elevated room that had fewer tables in it, and how kind they were to offer them a free bottle of Bordeaux to accompany their dinner, and how miserable Ferguson felt as he and Amy sat down for their last supper of all time, noting how perfectly apt it was that Amy should instinctively choose to sit in the chair with her back against the wall, meaning that she could look out and see the other people in the restaurant, while Ferguson instinctively sat down in the chair with his back to those other people, meaning that the only person he could see was Amy, Amy and the wall behind her, for that was who they were, he said to himself, that was who they had always been for the past four years and eight months, Amy looking out at others and he looking only at Amy.
They spent an hour and a half there, perhaps an hour and three-quarters, he was never sure exactly how long it was, and as the normally ravenous Amy picked at her food and Ferguson downed glass after glass of red wine, polishing off most of the first bo
ttle himself and then ordering another, they talked and fell silent, talked and fell silent again, and then talked and talked and talked, and soon enough Ferguson was being told they were finished, that they had outgrown each other and were moving in different directions now and therefore would have to stop living together, and no, Amy said, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, least of all Ferguson’s fault, he who had loved her so hard and so well since their first kiss on the bench in that little Montclair park, no, it was simply that she could no longer bear the smothering confines of couplehood, she had to be free to push on alone, to go out to California unattached and unencumbered by anyone or anything and continue working for the movement, that was her life now and Ferguson had no place in it anymore, her wonderful Archie of the big soul and kind heart would have to get along without her, and she was sorry, so sorry, so immensely sorry, but that’s the way it was now and nothing, not one thing in the whole wide world, could ever make it different.
Amy was crying by then, two streams of tears were falling down her face as she gently crucified the son of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, but Ferguson himself, who had far more reason to cry than she did, was too drunk to cry, not excessively drunk but drunk enough to feel no impulse to open the saltwater spigots, which was a fortunate thing, he felt, since he didn’t want her last impression of him to be that of a destroyed man weeping his guts out in front of her, and therefore he summoned every bit of the strength he still had in him and said:
O, my best beloved Amy, my extraordinary Amy of the wild hair and shining eyes, my darling lover of a thousand transcendent naked nights, my brilliant girl whose mouth and body have done such wondrous things to my mouth and body over the years, the only girl who has ever slept with me, the only girl I have ever wanted to sleep with, not only am I going to miss your body every day for the rest of my life, but I will especially miss those parts of your body that belong only to me, that belong to my eyes and my hands and are not even known to you by yourself, the parts of you that you have never seen, the back parts that are invisible to you just as mine are to me, just as they are to each person who has a body of his or her own, beginning with your ass, of course, your deliciously round and shapely ass, and the backs of your legs with the little brown dots on them that I have worshipped for so long, and the lines engraved in your skin just behind your knees, in the place where the legs bend, how I have marveled at the beauty of those two lines, and then the hidden half of your neck and the bumps in your spine when you lean over and the lovely curve in the small of your back, which have belonged to me and only to me for all these years, and most of all your shoulder blades, darling Amy, the jut of your two shoulder blades, which have always reminded me of swan’s wings, or the wings jutting from the back of the White Rock seltzer girl, who was the first girl I ever loved.