Page 175 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

*

The compromise was announced at a press conference on Friday. Fred Shuttlesworth attended, with cracked ribs from the water cannon, and announced: "Birmingham reached an accord with its conscience today!" Shortly afterward he fainted and had to be carried out. Martin Luther King declared a victory and flew home to Atlanta.

Birmingham's white elite had at last agreed to some measure of desegregation. Verena complained that it was not much, and in a way she was right: they were making a few minor concessions. But George believed that a huge change of principle had occurred: the whites had accepted that they needed to negotiate with the Negroes about segregation. They could no longer simply lay down the law. Those negotiations would continue, and they could go in only one direction.

Whether this was a small advance or a major turning point, every colored person in Birmingham was celebrating on Saturday night, and Verena invited George to her room.

He soon learned that she was not one of those girls who liked the man to take charge in bed. She knew what she wanted and she was comfortable asking for it. That was fine with George.

Almost anything would have been fine with him. He was enchanted by her lovely pale body and her witchy green eyes. She talked a lot while they made love, telling him how she felt, asking him if this pleased him or that embarrassed him; and the talk heightened their intimacy. He realized, more strongly than ever, how sex could be a way of getting to know the other person's character as well as her body.

Near the end she wanted to get on top. This, too, was new: no woman had done that with him before. She knelt astride him, and he held her hips and moved with her. She closed her eyes, but he did not. He watched her face, fascinated and enthralled, and when at last she reached her climax, he did too.

A few minutes before midnight he stood at the window in a robe, looking down on the streetlights of Fifth Avenue, while Verena was in the bathroom. His mind returned to the agreement King had struck with Birmingham's whites. If it was a triumph for the civil rights movement, die-hard segregationists would not accept defeat, he guessed; but what would they do? Bull Connor undoubtedly had a plan for sabotaging the agreement. So presumably did George Wallace, the racist governor.

That day the Ku Klux Klan had held a rally at Bessemer, a small town eighteen miles from Birmingham. According to Bobby Kennedy's intelligence, supporters had come from Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Mississippi. No doubt their speakers had spent the evening working them up into a frenzy of indignation about Birmingham giving in to the blacks. By now the women and children must have gone home, but the men would have started drinking and bragging to one another about what they were going to do.

Tomorrow would be Mother's Day, Sunday, May 12. George recalled Mother's Day two years ago, when white people had tried to kill him and other Freedom Riders by firebombing their bus at Anniston, sixty miles from here.

Verena emerged from the bathroom. "Come back to bed," she said, getting under the sheet.

George was eager. He hoped to make love to her at least once more before dawn. But just as he was about to turn away from the window, something caught his eye. The headlights of two cars were approaching along Fifth Avenue. The first vehicle was a white Birmingham Police Department patrol car, clearly marked with the number 25. It was followed by an old round-nosed Chevrolet from the early fifties. Both cars slowed as they drew level with the Gaston.

George suddenly noticed that the cops and state troopers who had been patrolling the streets around the motel had vanished. There was no one on the sidewalk.

What the hell . . . ?

A second later something was thrown from the open rear window of the Chevrolet, across the sidewalk, to the wall of the motel. The object landed right underneath the windows of the corner suite, Room 30, which Martin Luther King had occupied until he left earlier today.

Then both cars accelerated.

George turned from the window, crossed the room in two strides, and threw himself on top of Verena.

Her yell of protest was just beginning when it was drowned by a tremendous boom. The entire building shook as if in an earthquake. The air filled with the sounds of smashing glass and the rumble of falling masonry. The window of their room shattered with a tinkling noise like death chimes. There was a creepy moment of quiet. As the sound of the two cars faded, George heard shouts and screams from within the building.

He said to Verena: "Are you okay?"

She said: "What the fuck happened?"

"Someone threw a bomb from a car." He frowned. "The car had a police escort. Can you believe that?"

"In this goddamn town? You bet I can."

George rolled off her and looked around the room. He saw broken glass all over the floor. A piece of green cloth was draped over the end of the bed, and after a moment he realized it was the curtain. A picture of President Roosevelt had been blown off the wall by the force of the blast, and lay faceup on the carpet, crazed glass over the president's smile.

Verena said: "We have to go downstairs. People may be hurt."

"Wait a minute," George said. "I'll get your shoes." He put his feet down on a clear patch of the rug. To cross the room he had to pick up shards of glass and throw them aside. His shoes and hers were side by side in the closet: he liked that. He put his feet into his black leather oxfords, then picked up Verena's white kitten-heels and took them to her.

The lights went out.

They both dressed quickly in the dark. They discovered there was no water in the bathroom. They went downstairs.

The darkened lobby was full of panicking hotel staff and guests. Several people were bleeding but it seemed no one was dead. George pushed his way outside. By the streetlights he saw a hole five feet across in the wall of the building, and a spill of heavyweight rubble across the sidewalk. Trailers parked in the adjacent lot had been wrecked by the force of the blast. But, by a miracle, no one had been badly injured.

A cop arrived with a dog, then an ambulance drew up, then more police. Ominously, groups of Negroes began to gather outside the motel and in Kelly Ingram Park on the next block. These people were not the nonviolent Christians who had marched joyfully out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing hymns, George noted anxiously. This crowd had spent Saturday evening drinking in bars and pool halls and juke joints, and they did not subscribe to the Gandhian philosophy of passive resistance favored by Martin Luther King.

Someone said there had been another bomb, a few blocks away, at the parsonage occupied by Martin Luther King's brother, Alfred, always known as A. D. King. An eyewitness had seen a uniformed cop place a package on the porch a few seconds before the blast. Clearly the Birmingham police had tried to murder both King brothers at the same time.

---