Escape Velocity by Charles Portis
Her fingernails were of some interest. Each one had a dark brown line across it, at about the seven-month growth point. The nails were dark brown above the line and pink below it.
Dr. McFarland called them “nicotine lines,” and speculated that they marked the gradual exit of tobacco residue from her system.
At breakfast yesterday Miss Naderson said she rather regretted leaving the place. We were eating our wheat germ and other brown roughish things (even the sugar here has husks in it) and she was, in her manner, addressing us at large, as if we were all in a lifeboat together.
“This food is better than you get at the Waldorf,” she said. “And do you know why?”
“No, why is it better, Rosalie?” I asked.
“Because it’s prepared with love, that’s why. And there’s little enough love in the world as it is.”
You can never get ahead of Miss Naderson.
October 4, 1962
The Shattered Scene of Blast
Dazed and disheveled young girls wandered about in the parking lot just behind the [New York Telephone Company] building, many crying, some near hysteria. Inside was the familiar New York disaster scene, police and priests and firemen and ankle-deep water, choking white smoke and Bellevue interns in yellow helmets placing mangled bodies in wire baskets.
A half-hour earlier some of the girls, 100 or more, were having lunch in the basement-level employees’ cafeteria. The building is a long, low buff-brick structure with two floors above the basement. An oil-burning boiler stood in one corner of the basement, in a room adjoining the cafeteria.
Scarcely any one these days gives a thought to a boiler exploding, particularly in a new building, but suddenly at 12:07 p.m. this one went. It weighed at least a ton and it tore loose from its moorings and ripped across the cafeteria in a hellish explosion of steam.
“It was like a hurricane,” said Miss Diane Gerstel, 22, who was there. “There was a terrible gush of steam. You couldn’t see anything. I cried ‘My God, what happened?’”
Mrs. Gloria Salour, 23, was there, too, and she thought a nuclear bomb had fallen. “The walls cracked, smoke came pouring through. I thought it was the end.”
Directly above the boiler room, the blast punched through the concrete ceiling like a great fist, and flung girls and desks and filing cabinets all about the big accounting room on that floor.
Inside walls of cinder-block on both floors were shattered and buckled, but the outside wall near the boiler was not penetrated. Many of the outside windows were blown out and their metal frames twisted.
Some of the girls ran from the building, others helped drag or carry the injured out, and some climbed out the broken windows. Most of the dead were buried under the rubble near the boiler room or rather where the boiler room had once stood.
“They seemed to be coming out of every window and my son and I rushed across the street to help,” said Francis Holland, 48, who lives in an apartment building at 502 W. 213th St., across the street from the telephone building.
“They were bloody and their clothes were torn and some of them had broken arms. It’s about a six-foot jump from the windows to the sidewalk and we were grabbing them and getting them down.”
The victims lay there on the sidewalk screaming with pain, he said, but so many others were coming through the windows that there was no time for first aid. Within minutes, ambulances arrived from Fordham and Jewish Memorial hospitals.
Mr. Holland, security guard at New York University, said the windows of his apartment were broken by the explosion.
Most of the injured were women, he said, but there were some men, too. Few of them appeared to be burned.
Except for the burning oil from the boiler, there was little fire. There wasn’t much to burn among the plaster and concrete and metal office equipment, and the few small blazes that followed the explosion were quickly extinguished.
However, the ventilation system broke down. Both floors (they have low ceilings) and the basement were filled with smoke for more than an hour.
The girls at work on the top floor were knocked from their chairs and shaken up, but the blast did not penetrate through their floor. None of them was believed to be seriously injured.
The blast punched a bulge into the ceiling of the first floor, but did not quite break through into the second floor.
Considering the destruction, it would seem there must have been a terrific noise with the explosion, but there was disagreement over this.
Some of the girls said it was “tremendous” and “like an atom bomb” and others said it was “more of a muffled whoomp” and “like a garbage truck banging into a building.”
Thousands of people gathered on the streets around the building, and police had to put up barricades to keep them back.
The neighborhood, near the very northern tip of Manhattan, is composed of five-and six-story apartment buildings and small stores. Inwood Park is four blocks west from the telephone building, and the IRT elevated tracks run just behind the building on 10th Ave.
There were many stories of heroic conduct. A girl on the first floor said her office was on the verge of panic when Miss Celeste Meola, a section supervisor, took firm command and led the girls in an orderly line downstairs through the smoke and outside.
No one knew what had happened immediately, and there was a great fear of fire after the explosion, but many of the young men being trained for executives remained in the building to help evacuate the injured.
About an hour after the explosion, a policeman with a bullhorn began to call for all the workers from the building to report to tables that were being set up in the parking lot. They wanted to find out who was there and who was missing.
The girls, crying, shaking, some with blood on their dresses, formed lines and had their names checked off at the tables. Bodies were still being uncovered and carried out.
Upstairs in the girls’ long, wide-open accounting room, desks and cabinets lay toppled and covered with plaster under a pall of white smoke.
Papers and records littered the floor.
A pair of high-heeled shoes stood upright in a bare spot where there must have been a desk. A disembodied desk phone was on the floor ringing, its little red extension light winking. I wondered who was calling but I did not answer it.
New York Herald Tribune 1960–1964
Civil Rights Reporting
Portis’s excellent civil rights coverage—and its neglect by subsequent histories of the time—is discussed thoroughly in the introduction.
May 8, 1963
Birmingham’s Trigger Tension
BIRMINGHAM.
Three times during the day, waves of shouting, rock-throwing Negroes had poured into the downtown business district, to be scattered and driven back by battering streams of water from high-pressure fire hoses and the swinging of clubs of policemen and highway patrolmen.
Now the deserted streets were littered with sodden debris. Here in the shabby streets of the Negro section one of the decisive clashes in the Negro battle against segregation was taking place.
Last night a tense quiet settled over the riot-racked city after a day in which both sides altered their battle tactics.
The Negro crowds, who for days have hurled themselves against police barriers, divided into small, shifting bands, darted around the police and poured hundreds of separate patrols into the downtown business districts.
The police, who had crowded hundreds into the city’s overflowing jails, abandoned efforts to arrest the demonstrators. They concentrated on herding the mobs back toward the 16th Street Baptist Church, headquarters for these unprecedented demonstrations.
By day’s end, Alabama Gov. George Wallace had ordered some 250 state highway patrolmen in to aid beleaguered local police and had warned, at an opening session of the Legislature, that he would prosecute Negroes for murder if anyone died in the Birmingham riots.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a leader of the desegregation movement, sai
And in battered downtown Birmingham, a store manager looked out on the now-silent street, shook his head and told a reporter:
“It can’t keep building up.…People can get to the boiling point.”
The Negro drive had abandoned any pretensions of non-violence. The reaction of city officials had turned from determined resistance to harsh, personal hatred.
At the height of yesterday’s violence, firemen turned the jet stream of a high-pressure hose on a tiny wooden shack in a parking lot. Inside was 56-year-old Mrs. Martha Jones, a Negro. Unable to escape, she was hit with gallons of water and flying shards of glass.
Another victim of one of these battering streams of water was the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, one of Dr. King’s aides. Knocked flat by the jet stream he was taken away in an ambulance. “I been waitin’ a week to see Shuttlesworth knocked down,” said Commissioner Eugene (“Bull”) Connor. “Too bad it wasn’t a hearse.”
The violence was between Negro crowds and law officers. White throngs on the downtown sidewalks watched or went about their business—but they did not take part.
What will happen if young, white roughnecks—who have been the storm troopers previously against Negro demonstrators—come on the Birmingham scene?
This possibility haunts responsible people. “I’m amazed that we’ve not had trouble,” said Sheriff Melvin Bailey late yesterday.
The violence began around noon. About 500 Negro school children marched from the 16th Street church waving anti-segregation banners. Police shoved into the crowd, grabbed the banners, broke up the formation. But the police dogs that had been driven into previous Negro crowds were kept on their leashes. No one was arrested.
Milling around in a park across from the church were 1,000 Negro adults.
Suddenly, this crowd bolted toward the downtown area. Negroes surged into the street, and downtown Birmingham was a seething mass of demonstrators, spectators, marooned vehicles, and retreating, harried patrols of policemen.
The surge spent itself after half an hour and, in small groups, the Negroes began to drift back toward the church.
The crowd in the park grew and—as police cordoned off an eight-block area—an almost visible tension built up.
Four fire trucks lumbered up behind the lines of policemen.
Then, hundreds of Negroes, clapping, chanting, singing, suddenly reappeared in the downtown streets. They had apparently infiltrated; no mass movements had been seen.
The harassed police at the park listened to taunts from the Negro crowd: “Bring on the water…bring on the dogs.”
The dogs—five of them—remained leashed, but firemen turned on their hoses, soaking the demonstrators. Rocks flew through the air in response.
It was while the turmoil was at its height that Gov. Wallace announced in Montgomery that he was sending in the state patrolmen.
Shortly thereafter, Negro leaders borrowed police megaphones and pleaded with the crowds to disperse before the city gave way to complete anarchy.
“Go home,” they said. “You are not helping our cause.”
And slowly the Negroes drifted away.
As dusk settled over the troubled city, some of the newly arrived state troopers were posted at traffic intersections in the downtown area while Negroes flocked into the 16th Street Baptist Church for a night mass meeting that overflowed into another church.
What had happened?
The Negro crowds had not followed the tidy plan mapped by their leadership, according to the Rev. Andrew Young, one of the Negro clergymen. The plan, he said, had called for no massive charges, but for small, orderly marches of placard-carrying demonstrators.
What was being done?
White and Negro leaders were meeting—the where and the who were not revealed—in hopes a compromise could be worked out. Dr. King had told a morning news conference that the Negroes would end their demonstrations when they had achieved four goals: better job opportunities, desegregation of all downtown public facilities, formation of a bi-racial committee to solve race problems, and dropping of charges against arrested demonstrators.
May 10, 1963
Birmingham Bargaining Before Watchful World
BIRMINGHAM.
A shroud of confusion hung over the battle for desegregation here last night as reports were circulated that peace was and was not imminent.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., according to one report, said that a formula had been hammered out for settling the dispute. “The settlement has been sealed except for minor details,” he was quoted as saying.
But Wyatt Tee Walker, Dr. King’s executive secretary, said the story was “gravely in error,” according to another report.
Earlier, Dr. King had said he was half way to victory and hoped to complete his bargain with the city’s white leadership this morning.
“But if we can’t reach an agreement,” he said, “we will have no alternative but to resume large-scale demonstrations.”
The bargaining was being carried on during the second 24-hour truce Dr. King had declared. He insisted it was the last one. He had set a deadline at 9 a.m. today (11 a.m. New York time), and said that if an agreement were not reached by then, 3,000 Negroes would gather at their churches for a mass march on the city.
The 11th-hour announcement by Dr. King came as the world watched Birmingham developments—called “ugly” by President Kennedy. The agreement—its details are to be told today—presumably made the mass march unnecessary.
Pressures had been building up on all sides. Dr. King has a firebrand element in his group that was growing increasingly impatient of the delays.
“We’re getting tired of this,” said the Rev. James Bevel, leader of the group’s “angry young men.” “We want freedom now,” he added. Mr. Bevel is a field secretary in Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The white business men who are meeting with the Negroes—and apparently acceding to their demands—are catching it from Gov. George C. Wallace, both city administrations and a large segment of the white population.
“We got the Negroes licked,” said the outgoing Mayor, Arthur J. Hanes, who is still trying to hold the reins of government. “But the yellow-bellies and Quislings are down there now selling out our victory.”
Even the new “moderate” Mayor, Albert Boutwell, who has an office in City Hall but no power yet, is backing away from the blue-ribbon merchants committee involved in the negotiations.
“The City of Birmingham, the municipal government nor I as new Mayor is a party to these negotiations,” he said. He is being kept informed of what is going on at the meetings, he said, but he is not binding himself to any agreement reached at them.
The confusion at City Hall should be settled next week when the State Supreme Court is expected to pronounce just who is Mayor here.
Dr. King said earlier white leaders had agreed to two of his four demands—desegregation of lunch counters and all other facilities in downtown stores and upgrading the employment possibilities of Negroes in those stores.
The third demand—an amnesty for all demonstrators still in jail—is not in the merchants’ power to grant, but Dr. King said he would be satisfied with a “strong recommendation” from them to that effect. The fourth demand is for setting-up of a bi-racial committee in this strife-torn city.
He is still unconcerned that neither of the city administrations has been consulted on the negotiations, believing that the white business leaders carry enough economic weight to put the agreement over at City Hall.
There are said to be 75 men in this group and they call themselves the Senior Citizens’ Committee. It is an offshoot of the Chamber of Commerce.
The members of the committee had been invisible, nameless and unreachable until last night, when the chairman, Sidney W. Smyre, a realt
He said his committee “has had a number of meetings with responsible Negro leaders of the community and is still trying to work out agreements which will assure us tranquility with some degree of permanence.…We have made progress, and with the co-operation of all the people, I believe we will be able to find the answers we must have.”
As for the feasibility of desegregating lunch counters, Dr. King has drawn support from a strange quarter—Safety Commission[er] Eugene (Bull) Connor, policeman extraordinary.
Mr. Connor said he would not interfere if the merchants wanted to permit Negroes at their lunch counters, and as for the city ordinances against that practice, “they ain’t worth the paper they’re wrote on. The Supreme Court has killed all them laws.”
He had 1,200 policemen blocking off the Negro section of town from the downtown business section yesterday and will have the same detail on duty today.
His ever-growing force is made up of city and state police, sheriff’s deputies, game wardens, revenue agents and about 40 men in blue jeans and khaki who look as though they might have been rounded up at the bus station and deputized.
It turns out they are employees of the state Conservation Department. All the lawmen wear helmets of various shapes and colors and carry pistols and Louisville Slugger night sticks.
Col. T. B. Birdsong, Mississippi’s state police director, was in town a couple of days ago to offer help, but Mr. Connor said he had the situation well in hand.
“I can have 2,000 men here in 15 minutes,” he said. “I can get all the men I need in Alabama.” He said he particularly didn’t want any U.S. Marshals. “They don’t know any more how to handle a crowd than a snake knows about hips,” he said.
It was suggested that a sticky situation might develop if the 19 out-of-town rabbis, who have come to help the Negro movement, are used to lead the demonstrations. They have volunteered their services to Dr. King.
“If them rabbis get in the way, we’ll knock their asses down with the hose like anybody else,” said Mr. Connor.