Escape Velocity by Charles Portis
As for the police clubbing, the Mayor said he was already investigating and that “if the reports were true,” the guilty policemen would be disciplined. “There will be no police brutality in Jackson,” he said. “I can assure you of that.”
The Mayor knew most of the Negro preachers well enough to call them by their first names, and he seemed to be on particularly friendly terms with the older ones. He agreed with them that Jackson had reached its exploding point, and he pleaded with them to “calm your people down.”
The demonstrations are dangerous and in the end futile, he told them. “They’re not going to get anywhere, and we’re going to see that they don’t get anywhere.”
There were handshakes all around—all the amenities were observed—and the ministers left to take the sad news back to their people.
A funeral for Mr. Evers will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Negro Masonic Temple here on, of all things, Lynch St. The NAACP headquarters are also in the temple building. Mr. Evers’ body will be on view at Collins Funeral Home tonight. Many prominent civil rights figures in the country are expected to attend the service.
August 29, 1963
Rolling Down From N.Y.: Hopes, Fears and Holiday
WASHINGTON.
William Penn, an exuberant young man in beret and wrap-around sun glasses, sneaked on Bus 10 twice in the confusion, but was caught both times and ejected.
“Look lady, I’ve been with the cause all the way,” he said. “Now how about a seat?”
“I don’t want to tell you again, Penn,” said George Johnson, 30-yearold trail boss of CORE’s 24-bus convoy to Washington. “You’re supposed to be on Bus 6: now get on it and stay on it.”
It was 2 a. m. at the staging area, 125th St. and Seventh Ave., and Mr. Johnson already had his hands full with a hundred other problems. One group was complaining about having to ride on a school bus. A French TV crew had no tickets and wanted to get on Bus 10. Many youngsters were running around swapping tickets to be near friends.
Mr. Johnson finally threw up his hands. “All right. All right. I’ve had it. Get on your buses and stay there. No more switching. We’re leaving.”
Departure time was set for 2:30 a. m. We left at 3:40. Just before pulling out, however, the 34-year-old unemployed Mr. Penn came swinging aboard again, this time with a No. 10 ticket. “I got this cat to switch with me,” he explained. “I told him No. 6 was air-conditioned.”
Mr. Johnson was too tired to argue.
Everyone wanted to get on No. 10 because it was a prestige bus. Mr. Johnson was on it as captain and so were such other CORE luminaries as Omar Ahmed and Jim Peck.
The rest—there were 49 of us, including 27 whites—were a mixed bag of earnest young ideologues, middle-aged women and teen-agers. Mr. Penn was in a holiday mood. He wanted to sing and crack jokes.
No one else did, however. As soon as we passed through the Lincoln Tunnel nearly everyone went to sleep. Occasionally there was muttering in the back of the bus—“Make Penn get in his seat,” or “Shut up, Penn.”
At five we stopped for a break at a Cranbury, N.J., bus terminal. It was a mob scene, hundreds of buses.
“I hope this march will put the fear of God in our Congressmen,” said Mr. Johnson, sipping coffee from a paper cup. “But you just can’t put any faith in white men.”
At a near-by table a 15-year-old Negro boy named Bill Swinton was having coffee with his “Big Brother,” Marvin Holmes, a 39-year-old white man. As a Big Brother, Mr. Holmes spends much of his free time taking Bill to ball games and shows. Bill is an orphan who lives with his aunt in the Bronx. A few weeks ago Mr. Holmes asked Bill if he wouldn’t like to go to the big march.
Back on the Jersey Turnpike at 5:55, this time with the three French TV men aboard. They had been following in a car. Dawn was breaking, but there is really nothing to see on that featureless super highway. Just fog hanging in the low places of the meadows.
An hour and a half later we stopped at New Castle, Del., at a place called “Clemente’s—largest bus stop in the world.” I don’t know how they figure that. The place at Cranbury looked bigger. More coffee.
“Lord, I hope we don’t have any trouble down there,” said Dorothy Jones, a middle-aged Negro woman from Manhattan. “That would just maybe show that we’re not ready for responsibilities. But you know, I think we are. We’re ready to give something to this country, and we want to give.”
Did she have any trouble getting the day off?
“Oh no. Good old Mayor Wagner. I work at the city Personnel Department.” Mrs. Jones’ seat-mate on the bus was Mrs. Ruby Borges, her supervisor in the department. Also a Negro, Mrs. Borges was one of three people aboard who could speak French well enough to be interviewed by the TV men.
Ready to go again at 8:30. “Penn! Where’s Penn?” A search was instituted. After most of the buses had left, he finally showed.
“We’ve been waiting for you for 20 minutes,” said Mr. Johnson, furious.
“I’ve been in the bathroom.”
He tried once again to start to sing, but no one was very interested. They wanted to talk.
“A Chinese-African alliance seems to me the most obvious thing in the world,” said Mr. Ahmed.
“If we cannot solve this domestic race problem, we, as a nation, cannot survive,” said Mr. Johnson.
“You’ll have to define your term,” said E. F. Karman, a 35-year-old white Peace Corps member, who is leaving for Nigeria soon. “Do you mean that in the context of 1870 or 1910 or what?”
“Well, if it comes to that, I’ll take Chinese imperialism before Western imperialism,” said 19-year-old Wayne Kinsler, one of the Negro sit-ins arrested last week at City Hall.
This time it was Mr. Penn who went to sleep.
Through the Baltimore area there were groups of Negroes on the sidewalks waving at us. One girl had a sign saying, “You tell ’em.”
Same thing in Washington, the sidewalks were lined with wavers.
We crossed the city limits at 10:30. One of the first things to come into view was the Washington Monument. “One of these days, we’re going to change that to the Booker T. Washington Monument,” said Mr. Johnson.
The Washington police were terrific. The city was alive with buses, but it took just 20 minutes to pilot us in to our parking place on Independence Ave. and 17th St.
We had been on the road seven hours and ten minutes and the bus tachometer said we had gone just 221 miles from that dark Harlem street corner. Everyone was rumpled and sticky and had grainy eyes. But spirits picked up immediately as soon as we piled out on the grassy mall.
The buoyant Mr. Penn stepped out ahead of everyone and Mr. Johnson had to call him back. “We are in this town to do some marching,” said Mr. Penn. “I’d say, let’s go to it.”
New York Herald Tribune 1960–1964
London Bureau
Portis talks about his stint as the London bureau chief in his interview with Roy Reed, included here in the Epilogue. While there, he covered Britain’s reaction to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the opening of John Osborne’s controversial play Look Back in Anger, and the continuing conflict in Cyprus. He also profiled a self-proclaimed witch who carries a jackdaw named Hotfoot Jackson on her shoulder (“She told how he would dance to radio music. A comic bird”). He left the paper in November of 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write fiction. As the travel story below shows, he was never more comfortable than when he was on the move and observing other people on the move.
August 23, 1964
An American on Dylan’s Trail
HOLYHEAD, Wales.
The misty green island of Anglesey in North Wales is not the easiest place in the world to get to. It is a long way from London and you can’t arrive there by mistake. Consider then how disappointing it is to drive day and night over narrow mountain roads sustained only by cigarettes and Radio Caroline to find that other Americans have beaten you to the place.
At Holyhead, the end of the
“You’re not trying to hit the middle then?”
“Nah, not the middle,” said a fat man, and he went on to explain that complicated game.
The pub was crowded with beefy longshoremen in boots and sweaters but it was curiously quiet. When strangers are about it is always the same. At Laugharne (“Larn”) in South Wales, Dylan Thomas’s village, one enters the pub on the cove there and the old regulars are sitting around laughing and needling each other.
It is impossible to understand them, their English, but the sound effects are a joy. Then you hear someone order in an American twang, and it turns out to be you, and a dead silence falls. It is as though the Sun-Dance Kid had just walked through the swinging doors. After a while the talk starts again, but very low, and the fun is over until you leave.
Polite, helpful to a fault, the Welsh are nevertheless not to be drawn into familiar conversations with strangers. The exception too often turns out to be the town bore. He wants to talk about Goldwater because he thinks you want to talk about Goldwater. It is a hard topic to choke off.
Well, I don’t think he’ll be elected anyway, he is told.
“Aye, that’s what they said about Hitler.”
Goldwater’s not that bad. He’s not Hitler.
“I’m thinking they said the same about Hitler.”
They didn’t say he wasn’t Hitler, did they?
“They said he was not a dangerous man. Chamberlain said it, they all said it. You must read your history.”
Holyhead is the jumping-off place for Ireland. Irish sixpences and shillings turn up in your change there. The mail boat, a comfortable old tub called the Princess Maud, runs twice a day to Dublin and costs $6.86 one way, second class. The crossing takes three and a half hours and it raises a terrific Celtic thirst. They drink Guinness stout on that boat like condemned men.
“I served with Her Majesty’s forces for 27 years,” said one big fellow doing a fair imitation of Victor McLaglen [British actor and Oscar nominee for The Quiet Man—Ed.]. “I was a sergeant in the Irish Guards but I was mustered out of the Indian Army as a major. I’m the chalk man in a turf parlor now and I make plenty, don’t worry about that. Chalkie, they call me.”
Are the Irish the best of the guards regiments? he was asked.
“I will have to confess they are, my good friend. Mind you, I’m not saying the Welsh don’t have more V.C.s [Victoria Crosses, a British military honor—Ed.] than we do.”
There was an American girl on the Maud, a political science major from Chicago, who was making a lone junket around Europe on the backroads and staying at youth hostels for 50 cents a night. She too wanted to talk about Goldwater and, surprise, she was for him. “Goldwater is a respectable conservative and I would like to get that across to the Europeans I meet along the way,” she said. She is in for some long talks.
On arrival in the Irish Republic she was annoyed because no one would stamp her passport, and she wanted it as a souvenir. The traffic is so heavy between Britain and Ireland that they don’t bother on either side to check passports. The once-hated Englishman can even vote in Ireland and vice versa.
Dublin was alive with Americans, the richer ones there for the horse show. Not a hotel room was to be had, nor a car to be rented. A cab driver pointed out Trinity College and the windowless Bank of Ireland, then fell into a morose silence. The gentle Liffey was running Kodachrome green.
Rebellious American actor Sterling Hayden, said the Dublin Sunday Independent, was wandering bearded and unrecognized down around Cork with a rucksack on his back. At James Joyce’s Martello Tower there were no pilgrims, no Americans, no one. In an alley off O’Connell St. a crowd gathered to watch a man bind himself in straitjacket and chains, then wriggle free.
“Please bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that I am a man of 56 years of age,” he said. “You would pay two shillings to see this in performance anywhere in the free world. All I ask is your very close attention and one small silver six pence.”
The boat back to Holyhead, for no apparent reason, was loaded with family groups. Boisterous children were everywhere, running and skidding on the deck, which was wet with Guinness’. Rule: The Irish are kinder to their children than the English and take no disciplinary action until the nippers really get out of hand. Then they swat the daylights out of them. The English tend to treat their children like simple-minded little soldiers who need constant correction. Rule 2: Irish girls are livelier and more fun but the English and Welsh girls are better looking.
Britain has no fairer scenery than coastal Wales and the mountains of the north. The 13th-century castle at Caernarvon is itself worth the trip. The beaches, especially the one at Borth, are fine, but the sea is like ice. Impatient, must-get-there tourists shouldn’t bother because Welsh roads are narrow and positively medieval in some villages. It takes twice as long to drive 10 miles as it would in the United States. There are no motels to speak of but there are a good many hotels. In summer months reservations are absolutely necessary in Britain and Ireland though there are plenty of “bed and breakfast” places—boarding houses—good for an overnight stay.
I went to one in Dublin and when the landlady said it would be one pound ten ($4.20) for the night I said I had been told it was only a pound. She was redheaded and she almost hit the ceiling.
“Are you English?”
“American.”
“Oh…very well then, a pound.”
Two
TRAVELS
That New Sound from Nashville
The cover story of the Saturday Evening Post from February 12, 1966, featured a photograph of Roger Miller. Portis, the contributors’ page states, “has written a comic novel that will be published this year by Simon & Schuster”; portions of that novel, Norwood, about the travels and travails of the would-be country star Norwood Pratt, were published in two installments in the Post in June and July of 1966.
Nashville, the Athens of the South, is home to Vanderbilt University, Fisk University and at least half a dozen other colleges, as well as a sym phony orchestra, a concrete replica of the Parthenon and a downtown beer joint called Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. Tootsie’s is where the country-music people hang out—those who don’t object to beer joints. It has a very active jukebox and shaky tables, and there are 8-by-10 glossies all over the wall and a clutter of small-bore merchandise be hind the counter—stuff like gum, beef sticks and headache powder. The hostess is Tootsie Bess, a motherly, aproned woman who doesn’t mind noise or a certain amount of rowdiness, but whose good nature has its limits. One night a drunk song-writer addressed Maggie, the cook, as “nigger,” and Tootsie threw him out and banned him. She has three cigar boxes full of I.O.U.’s.
On Saturday nights, performers on the Grand Ole Opry step out the stage door and cross an alley and go in the back door of Tootsie’s to get aholt of themselves between sets with some refreshing suds. Songwriters—“cleffers,” as the trade mags say—sit around and chat and wait for artistic revelations. Deals are closed there. New, strange guitar licks are conceived.
Roger Miller (King of the Road), the antic poet who was too far out to have any success on the Opry itself, was singing and clowning in Tootsie’s back room years ago, for free. “He wrote Dang Me right here in this booth,” says Tootsie. But his rates are stiffer now. He just did a special for NBC-TV and is talking with them about starring in a series next year. “Yeah, Roger’s doing all right,” says a Nashville business associate. “He was in here the other day with a quarter of a million dollars in his pocket. It was two checks.”
Tootsie’s is like a thousand other beer joints in the South with such names as Junior’s Dew Drop Inn and Pearl’s Howdy Club, and a certain type of country boy feels right at hom
This is the milieu of commercial country music, the Southern honkytonk. Sometimes it’s called “hillbilly music,” which is only half accurate, be cause the southern lowlanders have contributed just as much as the hill folks, perhaps more; and sometimes “country and western,” which is misleading because such of it as reflects the culture west of Abilene, Tex., tends to be pretty thin stuff. “Southern white working-class music” would never do as a tag, but that’s what it is.
By any name, country music is prospering, and so is Nashville’s recording industry, which now does a brisk non-country trade. Perry Como, hitless for almost two years, packed a carpetbag recently and went to Nashville and came back with a hit single, Dream On, Little Dreamer, by two country-music writers, and a hit album, The Scene Changes. The golf was good too, he says. Both RCA Victor and Columbia have built big new studios there in the past year, and all sorts of un likely people—Al Hirt, Ann-Margret—are going there to record. Elvis Presley always has.
It is odd in a way that the country-music business should have settled in Nashville, instead of in a rougher, rawer town like, say, Shreveport. (Shreveport does have a lesser version of the Opry called “The Louisiana Hayride.”) Nashville is an old town (1780), a state capital, a college town, and a headquarters town for southern churches.
There are some 200,000 people in the city proper. It is a pleasant, green, genteel, residential place on the banks of the Cumberland River in the rolling hills of middle Tennessee. Nashville once had poets like Sidney Lanier and Allen Tate, and now it has Ernest Tubb and doesn’t quite know what to do with him, except ignore him. Few country singers manage to get themselves taken seriously in Nashville. Eddy Arnold is a big community man, and he is being discussed as a Democratic nominee for governor next year. Roy Acuff ran for governor as a Republican, unsuccessfully. But generally, the Athenians of the South go one way, and the country-music people another. Less than 10 percent of the Opry audiences come from the Nashville area. Middle-class Nashvillians, anxious lest they be mistaken for rubes, are quick to inform the visitor that they have never attended the show. It is not for them, this hoedown. They long for road-company presentations of socko Broadway comedies. Even radio station WSM, which carries the Opry, is not really a country-music station. “Oh, no,” says Ott Devine, WSM’s Opry manager. “Except for the Opry and a few record shows we’re a good music station.”