He'd been stuck inside Jeff City's sad gray ramparts for seven years, and he had another eighteen hanging over him. While there, he'd organized his life around the goal of escape--it was the central idea that had focused and sustained him. He'd scrimped and schemed in the shadows of a deliberate and tenacious obscurity. He'd perfected a kind of anti-identity, so that no one would notice him when he was there--or miss him when he was gone.
That night, 416-J called his brother18 and arranged a rendezvous spot. Then he hopped an eastbound freight train.19 Feeling what must have been some mixture of anxiety and delight, he rolled past the Jeff City prison complex. How many jittery nights had he lain awake in his prison cell, listening to the whistle of locomotives running over these same tracks that now gave him flight?
Sprung from Jeff City's walls, he let his mind begin to churn with thoughts of other jobs, other projects of greater complexity and ambition. But now he was heading home, in the direction of St. Louis.
BOOK ONE
IN THE CITY OF THE KINGS
When I took up the cross I recognized its meaning ...
The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1967)
1 CITY OF WHITE GOLD
IN EARLY MAY 1967, three hundred miles downstream from St. Louis, the citizens of Memphis stood along the cobblestoned banks, enjoying the musky coolness of the river. Seventy-five thousand people, dressed to be seen, waited in the twilight. They'd come from all the secret krewes20--from the Mystic Society of the Memphi, from Osiris and RaMet and Sphinx. They'd come from all the clubs--Chickasaw, University, Colonial, Hunt and Polo, the Memphis Country Club--and from the garden societies. The good families, the old families, in their finest James Davis clothes, bourbon flasks in hand, assembled for the start of the South's Greatest Party.
The brown Mississippi, wide with northern snowmelt, was a confusion of crosscurrents and boils. In the main channel, whole trees could be seen shooting downstream. A mile across the river lay the floodplain of Arkansas, a world of chiggers and alligator gars and water moccasins that lived in swampy oxbow lakes. On the long sandbars, feral pigs ran among graveyards of driftwood and rotten cypress stumps.
But in the clearings beyond these wild margins were hundreds and hundreds of miles of cotton fields. Cotton as far as the eye could see, row after perfect row. Gossypium hirsutum. White gold, mined from the world's richest alluvium.
Memphis was built on the spot21 where the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, in 1541, became the first European to lay eyes on the Mississippi River. The city was founded 278 years later by Andrew Jackson and a group of his investor cronies, and named for the ancient Egyptian capital near the Giza pyramids. Memphis didn't really take off, however, until the dense hardwood forests along the river began to be cleared in the mid-nineteenth century, finally making farmable the flat, rich floodplain known as the Mississippi Delta. As the country slid toward Civil War, Memphis became the capital of a region that was constructing a last frenzied iteration of Southern planter society. If the Delta came late to cotton, it came to it with a vengeance, and with all the defiant desperation of someone following a wounded creed.
Cotton had grown along the Nile near the original Memphis, and cotton was what modern Memphis had come to celebrate on this fine humid evening of May 10, 1967. In the fields of Arkansas, and down in nearby Mississippi, the little darlings had already begun to push through the dirt, the crop dusters were preparing to rain down their chemicals, and the old true cycle was in the offing. Now it was time for Memphians to pay homage and to bless another season in cotton's splendid realm.
The thirty-third annual Cotton Carnival, Memphis's answer to Mardi Gras, was about to begin. Later in the week, there would be luncheons, trade shows, and charity balls. A beauty contest would declare the fairest Maid of Cotton. Many thousands would visit the giant midway and attend parades with elaborate floats, some of them spun from cotton, depicting the gone-but-not-forgotten Old South and the treachery of the long-snouted boll weevil. All week there would be parties on the rooftop of the Peabody Hotel, where mallard ducks lived in a scaled-down mansion when they weren't marching down a red carpet to splash around in the lobby fountain.
Tonight was the high pageant that kicked off the whole week--the majestic arrival of the King and Queen, sitting upon their thrones with their sequined court all around them, on a great glittery barge that was scheduled to nudge into the Memphis harbor shortly after sunset. It was a celebration not only of cotton but also of the peculiarly settled life that thrived on it--the life of dove hunts and pig roasts and debutante balls, the genteel agrarian world that could still be found in the fertile realms surrounding Memphis.
Cotton, cotton everywhere. Crane operators, hoisting dozens of five-hundred-pound cotton bales, had constructed colossal arches that spanned the downtown streets. All attendees were urged to wear cotton, and they did: party girls in crinoline dresses, dandies in seersucker suits, children in starched oxford cloth. People even ate cotton candy while they waited with the crowds for the Royal Barge to arrive.
Representatives from all echelons of the Delta cotton world had joined the masses on the river--the factors, the classers, the ginners, the brokers, the seed sellers, the plantation owners, the compress owners, the board members of the Cotton Exchange, the loan officers from the Union Planters Bank, the chemical engineers who'd learned how to tease out the plant's oils and secret compounds for every industrial purpose Mammon could devise.
Cotton's presence, and cotton's past, could be felt everywhere along the shadowed waterfront. Behind the cheering crowds, high on the magnolia-lined bluff once occupied by Chickasaw Indians, sat Confederate Park, with its bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, who'd made his home in Memphis after the Civil War. A block from the park was the place on Adams Avenue where Nathan Bedford Forrest once operated a giant slave market, said to be the South's largest, that boasted "the best selected assortment of field hands, house servants, and mechanics ... with fresh supplies of likely Young Negroes."
Running lengthwise along the same bluff lay Front Street, cotton's main drag.22 In the upstairs classing rooms, sharp-eyed savants still graded cotton samples by pure intuition under north-facing skylights--judging according to quaint industry distinctions like "strict low middling" or "strict good ordinary." Memphis remained one of the largest cotton markets in the world, with massive fortunes made and lost and made again. Many of the names were legends--Dunavant, Cook, Turley, Hohenberg, Allenberg--high rollers in a vaguely druidic enterprise. In October, during harvest time, the skies above Front Street still swirled with snows of lint.
Cotton cotton cotton. Memphis couldn't get enough of it. Cotton was still king. It would always be king.
IN TRUTH, THOUGH no one wanted to talk about it on that roistering night in 1967, the old world of Delta cotton was in serious trouble. Life on the plantations had changed so fast it was hardly recognizable. Soybeans had made inroads as the new mono-crop of choice. Polyester had encroached upon the American wardrobe. Massive mechanized cotton pickers, along with new soups of pesticides and herbicides, had rendered largely obsolete the life of the Delta sharecropper. Thus demoted by petrochemicals and machines, many thousands of black field hands and their families steadily left the plantations over the decades and came to Memphis--the nearest city, and the only American city of any size named after an African capital.
Other than mule skinning or chopping cotton, though, most Delta field hands had little in the way of marketable skills when they came to the city. Some found success playing the blues on Beale Street--the central thoroughfare of black Memphis. But most settled into low-end jobs that merely recapitulated the racial and socioeconomic hierarchy they'd known on the plantations. Many became maids, janitors, waiters, yardmen, cooks, stevedores. Some had no choice but to take the lowest-end job of all: they reported to the Public Works Department and became garbagemen.
At least they'd come to a
city with a history that was rich and gothic and weird. Memphis, this city of 600,000 people wedged in the southwestern crotch of Tennessee, had always had a touch of madness but also a prodigious and sometimes profane sense of humor. It was a town known for its outlandish characters and half-demented geniuses: wrestlers, riverboat captains, inventors, gamblers, snake-oil salesmen, musicians high on some peculiar native vibe that could be felt but whose existence could not be proved. For 150 years, all the pain and pathos of the river seemed to wash up on the cobblestoned banks. In 1878, the city was nearly completely destroyed by a yellow fever epidemic,23 but the Metropolis of the American Nile had recovered, madder and stranger and more full of brawling ambition than ever. Memphis, as one writer famously put it, "was built on a bluff24 and run on the same principle."
It was a city that, since its very inception, had been perched on the racial fault line. The first mayor, Marcus Brutus Winchester,25 created a major scandal by falling for, and eventually marrying, a "woman of color." One of the area's most fascinating citizens in the late 1820s, a Scottish-born utopian named Fanny Wright, created an experimental commune of slaves whom she sought to educate and bring into full citizenship. Several generations later, Memphis gave the world Ida B. Wells,26 an early titan of the civil rights movement, a woman of profound courage who, in the 1890s, repeatedly risked assassination with eloquent protests against lynching. Then there was the ever-cryptic Mr. Forrest, who quit his slave mart and took up a sword in the Civil War, becoming one of the most wickedly brilliant generals in American history. After the war he returned to Memphis, where, after briefly serving as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, he apparently experienced an epiphany--renouncing the Klan27 with seeming genuineness and calling for racial reconciliation shortly before his death.
But music was the city's greatest gift and particular genius: the blues of W. C. Handy's Beale Street, the soul of Stax Records, and a certain interracial sound stew that a redneck wizard named Sam Phillips cooked up in a tiny studio on Union Avenue, less than a hundred yards from where Forrest lay buried. At its essence, the music of Memphis was about the fecund intermingling of black and white. Elvis Presley, coaxed and prodded by Phillips, found a way to transmute the raw sound of Beale Street into something that would resonate across the world. The stars, white and black, who had passed through the studios and nightclubs of Memphis were as numerous as they were legendary: not just Elvis, but Rufus Thomas, Johnny Cash, B. B. King, Albert King, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Roy Orbison, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Redding, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim. The phantom-like Robert Johnson, perhaps the greatest of the Delta bluesmen, lived in and around Memphis much of his short, tragic life. It could be argued that over the decades, Memphis's musical ferment had done more to integrate the country than a hundred pieces of legislation.
In a way, cotton was at the center of the ferment, for cotton had spawned the blues, and cotton had built the city that gave the blues its first wider expression. But there was no mistaking the fact that most black folks in Memphis were good and done with cotton, and they hated most everything about the hairy prickly shrub that had so long enslaved them. Certainly not many black people were to be found on the banks of the river on that May night in 1967, awaiting the arrival of the Royal Barge.
THE SKIES OVER Arkansas ripened to a final brilliant red before closing into darkness. It seemed as though the sun had literally buried itself in cotton fields. An orchestra played strains of Vivaldi, and the heavens crackled with fireworks.
Then, from under the bridge, the dazzling vessel slipped into view, with the crowds gasping in wonder. At first it was just a burst of bright light, a diaphanous vision floating out on the currents. As it drew nearer to the harbor, the ravishing details began to emerge. The barge was the size of a football field, with a giant art deco cotton boll rising over the sparkling set. Egyptian motifs were woven into the decorations--pyramids, sphinxes, hieroglyphics: the Old South meets the land of the pharaohs.
Seated on their thrones high up in the towering boll were King Joseph and Queen Blanche, 1967's monarchs, wearing their crowns, holding their scepters. As always, they'd been chosen in secret, by some obscure protocol known only to the Mystic Society of the Memphi. As always, he was an older man, a business potentate, while she was a nubile paragon of Southern pulchritude, college aged and presumably a virgin. They were blindingly white people, in blindingly white clothes, sitting high in their resplendent perch. In unison, they cupped their gloved hands and gave the crowds tiny swiveling waves, as if to say, Here we are! ... There you are! ... We're all here!
More than a hundred people made up the royal court, all posed together on the barge like the largest wedding party ever assembled. There were the duchesses, the counts, the pages, the princesses and their tuxedoed escorts. There were the young girls, who curtsied with labored formality and attended the train of Her Majesty's gown. There were the weevils, the masked green jesters28 whose identities were unknown. On one side of the Royal Barge stood the Ladies of the Realm--belles from plantation towns all over the Mississippi Delta. On the other side were the Ladies-in-Waiting--belles from the city, from good families, and of marriageable age.
The court moved about the barge in a carefully choreographed promenade. Everyone was smiling, bowing, waving, beaming. "Don't get wise with me," the king warned, "or I'll have you all beheaded." When the music reached a fever pitch, King Joseph and Queen Blanche rose and took a bow. All along the bluff, the seventy-five thousand loyal subjects erupted in thunderous cheers: Hail, King Cotton and His Queen!
Then, in a swirl of lights, the court began to parade off the stage, and off the barge, and onto the old cobblestones, the royals closely guarded by uniformed young men dressed as Confederate colonels. Like Peabody ducks, the revelers strutted down a long red carpet to a waiting convoy of Cadillac convertibles and were whisked away to the first parties of the season.
2 GOING FOR BROKE
SIX MONTHS LATER, in November 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. found himself in Frogmore, in the swampy Low Country of South Carolina not far from Hilton Head, where his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was having its annual conclave. King had decided to use the retreat as a platform to announce a bold new direction for the SCLC. With nearly a hundred staffers, board members, and volunteers in attendance, he would unveil an ambitious turn in the organization's focus. It would be controversial, radical, revolutionary in scope.
King had decided that late next spring--the spring of 1968--he would return to the Washington Mall, the site of his triumphant "I have a dream" speech. Only this time, he envisioned something much more confrontational than an afternoon of soaring oratory. Instead, he would bring an army of poor people from all around the country--not just African-Americans, but indigents from various Indian tribes, whites from Appalachia, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Eskimos, Pacific islanders from the U.S. territories. They would camp out on the Mall for weeks, living in a vast shantytown at the foot of the monuments. They would paralyze the city. They would tie up traffic. They would hold daily sit-ins in the halls of government. They would occupy the nation's capital and refuse to leave until their demands were met. It would be an act of civil disobedience on a scale never witnessed before. The only precedent that King could come up with was the Bonus Marchers, the World War I veterans who descended on Washington in the summer of 1932 to claim their promised benefits.
King had been moving in this direction for years, but his thinking had really crystallized over the summer, after the horrific riots in Detroit and Newark led him to believe that America--its structures and its practices, its very idea--was in serious trouble. "For years," he said, "I labored with reforming29 the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."
America, he beli
eved, was now a sick society in need of "radical moral surgery." It had become arrogant, selfish, more interested in things than in people. Washington was moving forward with its disastrous war in Southeast Asia while pursuing Cold War policies that seemed to be taking the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. "My own government,"30 he said, has become "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
The specter of mass riots was a symptom of a larger disease within the body politic, he said. Consumed by Vietnam, the space race, and other expensive military-industrial projects, the government was unwilling to confront the appalling conditions in the ghettos of America. This lack of compassion was shortsighted, he felt, for if something wasn't done immediately, there would be more riots next summer--much more destructive riots. King genuinely feared the country might slip into a race war that would lead, ultimately, to a right-wing takeover and a kind of fascist police state.
Some of the root problems had to do with capitalism itself, he argued. For years, King had been accused of being a secret Communist, which was flatly untrue, but for several years he had been moving toward advocating a form of democratic socialism similar to that practiced in Scandinavia (a notion inspired in part by his 1964 visit to Sweden and Norway to collect his Nobel Peace Prize). "The good and just society,"31 he said, "is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism."
King's vision for a poor people's descent on Washington had grown out of months of soul-searching, and a summer he spent living in a tenement in one of Chicago's worst slums. He'd been thinking closely and intensely about poverty--its origins, solutions, and effects. He viewed the new campaign as an alternative to riots, a last chance for nonviolence. His Poor People's Army would demand that the government initiate a kind of Marshall Plan to attack poverty in America--programs for mass job creation, health care, better schools, and a guaranteed minimum income for every person in the land.