'Then we moved on past the dream'
(Continued from page 1)
nival tents lining the shore. Across the water was the Lincoln Memorial, shining under spotlights. The Washington Monument stood like a bright white rocket pointing to some other frontier. And around us the trees were shaking in the wind with dark shapes running between them from tent to tent.
Someone stopped behind me. I'm not sure who it was, because he moved on quickly. But with a voice that sounded like an old man's he said two words, "Valley Forge." Then he was gone and the wind blew his phrase away.
Police move to meet students at Dupont Circle
Some of the marshals had been standing in the cold acting as student police for the entire March Against Death, which had started seven hours earlier and would end in three hours. They directed the people through the tents to pick up name cards and join the march.
Photo by Ray DiTirro
I CARRIED Dave Stone across the bridge and toward the capital. I carried him in Oz toward the White House, but the Wizard was warm in Florida, and no one except the hundreds of military guards were listening as we walked in front of the White House and yelled out each name that we carried. Some of the voices that called the names were hoarse and shaking with the cold. Some of the voices broke. Then we moved on past the dream—the great white glowing building with the names bouncing off and echoing. No lights were on inside.
It was 1 am, when we started across the bridge over the Potomac. The wind was like ice water spray that cut you into another slice each time a gust came off the river. The temperature was in the 20s. A bell tower at the end of the bridge was tolling. We passed it showily in single file as it rang for each of the dead.
Finally we approached the Capitol Building. Many of the marchers had broken the single file and were huddled together under blankets, walking slowly.
I carried Dave Stone down the long street. My candle kept going out.
At a street corner a roar arose and thirty troop carriers thundered by with ghostly faces staring out over the tail gates. Broken eggs were everywhere, thrown at the daylight marchers.
WE REACHED THE Capitol Building and laid the names in a long row of wooden coffins. A middle-aged woman in front of me held her's close to her breast for a moment. Her eyes were closed. And then she dropped it and walked off quickly. I put Dave's name in a coffin and whispered, "Dave Stone, may he rest in Peace." And the bell at the bridge was still ringing.
Grey dawn turned to bright morning and at last we saw the sun. It warmed us a little and we walked toward the Capital, three of us now separated from the rest of the Kansans.
The long park was drowned in people as the morning moved on. Near 11 a.m. Eugene McCarthy spoke in the park. He said half a million people were better witness than 52,000 telegrams sent by the "silent majority." He said to carry on. The marchers carried on, forming into the parade that strung itself through the city.
The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church was a very cold place. The draft blew in from opening doors across the rows of tired marchers who were not allowed to lie down. Perhaps the church officials feared an orgy. Out of the 23 hours the Kansas delegation was in Washington all but three or four were spent outside in the cold.
McCarthy did not march. He left in a car.
THE MARCHERS HELD to
together like a fine fabric of many
colors. But woven into that fabr-
ic were strands of soft sadness.
or madness, and if the right strand was pulled, the cloth would fall apart. Hundreds of well organized Student Mobe marshals held it together, arms linked on each side of the parade.
Nov.19
1969
2 KANSAN
At one point it turned, deflected by a half-circle of buses pulled up to keep the march away from the White House. The parade moved down through the rows of police, some of them smiling, some of them dressed like spacemen, some of them with that same fear in their eyes that the truckdrivers had shown.
Then the parade flowed into the long park below the Washington Monument. The people sat for an hour waiting for the show. Peter and Mary (Paul could not be found) sang their songs, and then came William Sloane Coffin, Dr. Spock, Dick Gregory, Rip Torn, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Coretta King, and others. Timothy Leary was enthroned in the bleachers beside the stage.
GREGORY TALKED OF the great moral force that could move the earth into heaven. Arlo Guthrie grinned and tilted back his cowboy hat, "I don't have much to say. It's already been said. I don't even think anybody had to show up. I mean, when they put the machine guns on the Capitol Building, well, the point was made."
And George McGovern spoke above the catcalls of the Weathermen. (Dylan: "You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.)
A girl in front of me began to cry with the cold. A boy helped her to her feet and she began to cough and others had their eyes clinched tight, their arms wrapped around their knees. They seemed dead, like Indian mummies. But the mass would suddenly come alive, sounding like a thousand football games.
ON CUE THEY became grain in the wind, waving hands in Peace. All together, yet all apart—an image arose of a half million different thoughts rising up in a single cloud. The cloud rose above Washington and out of it came the heartbeat thunder of "Peace Now, Peace Now, Peace Now, Peace Now." And the single passion above the sea of hands waving all together was somehow as frightening as warnings of war. The cloud rained down a warning, a warning of passion gone mad. Perhaps.
I wandered into the city. They were strange, these thoughts. The cloud had moved into my mind and a fog blew all around. The cold and the crowd moving up the street pushed me into a hotel lobby, where the marchers huddled in the warmth. A girl asked me where a television was. "I have to find one to see what's going on."
Out of the lobby. Into the street again. Thirty-hours without sleep for most of these people. Some had slept less. Many more hours to go. Found my way to a movie theater in the cloud. Paid the money to the
Police prepared to meet members of the Weathermen, a militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society, at DuPont Circle Friday night. This confrontation was one of only two violent events marring an otherwise peaceful three-day protest in Washington, D.C. Weathermen also broke windows and disrupted business in downtown Washington Saturday afternoon.
man and sank down under celluloid. Images. Two movies I don't remember. Dreams. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Don't remember the name of the other movie. Remember nothing of either show. Wake up suddenly, shaking with cold. Then finally out of the darkness and again on the street.
I SAT AT a counter waiting for the phone in a drugstore. The bus for Kansas was leaving at 8 p.m. and I didn't know the departure point. Call the church. The fog hangs on.
A black woman, about forty,
once pretty, sat next to me. "Can
you help me? The cabs won't
come because of all the people."
stop a cab. None would stop.
Finally I ran to a streetlight where the cars were lined up and walked down that line, knocking on the windows of three or four taxis. The drivers stared straight ahead. They wouldn't look at me. Again, that fear. Running back to the woman I said, "I'm sorry. No one will stop."
The cloud was gone. The fog was lifting, I made my call and we went out to the street corner and tried to wave down a cab. They wouldn't stop. "If you need a place to stay tonight," she was saying, shaking, "You can sleep at my place. It's in the worst part of town, but you can sleep upstairs in my boyfriend's apartment cause he stays with me."
Her face was a mask with features of dry crying. She was holding her stomach. "I have this pain in my gut. I've been carrying this television all day. I want to get the television home. I want to get home."
"I'll go inside and call my girlfriend who lives near here. It's within walking distance, but she doesn't have a car. Will you carry my TV there? Please." We went to the girlfriend's and the woman thanked me. I ran back to an intersection.
"TM LEAVING AT eight. But thanks." For an hour we tried to
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