The vigil came together on a clear night and we sang to a guitar and held candles and then held hands and prayed. The white train roared past without any reaction. Made a lot of noise but paid no attention. But we could sleep in peace for a night. We could stand to be alone in our skin, with ourselves. Even if it was in an abandoned building waiting for the wrecking ball. Which was where I was residing at the time.
Anticipating and donating to the election that would bring in Reagan and the explosion of gentrification and condoization and commercial property development and displacement of people living in affordable apartment buildings up to that point, investors had purchased buildings on prime developable land downtown (have I mentioned this is placed in Atlanta? I haven't? Well, it is.) and vacated them and left them as shells which of course became squatters' late night territory, and one unit of one of them was mine.
The “armies of the night” which descended on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about had become squatters sneaking anonymous even to themselves into abandoned fields and lots and buildings. To sleep late at night and disappear at first light. The space I “took over” was a dirty top floor with a bed frame and an empty window frame which let in the moonlight and the streetlight, and one door over, on the same broad top floor, the semi-destructed remains of a once grand apartment building, home to students and elders on fixed incomes when it had been viable a decade or so before. The developers, in other words, had demolished the building, then the financing must have fallen through, because the disassembling simply stopped. A building bombed out, skeletal in part, completely whole in other parts, filling an entire city block, populated in its various discrete, once-mannered sections by squatters who assiduously ignored and avoided one another. Nothing collectivist about it. No protests of squatters' rights, just sneaking in late at night, sneaking out at first light and doing the best one could not to be seen or be in the least detected. Carried little in, left out with nothing left behind.
The building stank of rat shit and cockroach shells from years back, the only sign of life once the sun came up. The rats had split. The cockroaches fled the light. You know, actually, I got that wrong. That was later. After that fight with Bard — sad night it was — and Miriam threw me out ot her place, the half-completed half-assed halfway house she had in mind before her money ran out and all the hippies who were helping her build it had flown to parts unknown or to rehab or to the Great Southwest.
I believe, come to think of it, at that time, the time I went with the Open Door folks to vigil the “white train,” I was staying clean, and sleeping in furniture padding in a side space of a branch library up in Buckhead, at that time the Ritzy part of town. Replaced in opulence and pretense by Ashford-Dunwoody by now, I believe. They all have these Scotch-Irish names. WASP-y entitlement.
People who sleep in pajamas.
There was always an unlocked glass door yielding a rubber-matted space where people could come in to deposit books in the donation barrel, a colorful oil drum. Open at all hours. The people living in that vicinity were bizarre as I look back. To leave the door unlocked at all hours so they could drop off books for the annual book sale? Odd. No two ways about it.
The janitorial folks knew me and I never left a mess. Mutual respect. I would get up at first light, the very crack of dawn, my hyper-vigilance, my alarm clock, and go out to a faucet at the neighboring bank branch and pour water for my instant Maxwell House purchased for $1.25 at the 7 Day Junior down the hill. I'd gather myself in my glass perch, feeling like a monkey in a zoo but unrevealed behind a hedge, and sat on folded legs, reading from the barrel. Dip my ladle in and sip from the cool water. Read DISPATCHES, I remember, and DOG SOLDIER and SEVEN STORY MOUNTAIN. I didn't know about Thomas Merton other than having seen him quoted in the Catholic Worker. I know I had been making my way meditatively through Merton around the time of the vigil against the white train (Which wasn't white. It was painted a camouflage of beautiful rich colors, gleaming apple red, imperial blue, the same blue as the wall in the pods of the spanking new Atlanta jailhouse, oceanic green and orange, very true to their status in the spectrum, vivid beneath the lights as the train passed, a wonderful sight in the deep moonless night of northern Alabama, a ruse to cover its death trip, put you off the scent. "Look, Mommy! Look at the glass bead game! Look at the rosary! Look at the prayer beads!" Ooooh, the colors...mommy...can I go to war now, mommy, please mommy please...)
Yeh, I remember I was into a Merton trip around the time of the white train vigil.
I had been to nearby Decatur, close to the vigiling site, once about five years before when I was living in Atlanta and some of us went to protest the framing of Tommy Lee Hines, a young black man accused of raping a white woman. No evidence bore out the accusation of the white woman but Tommy Lee was sufficiently challenged that he incriminated himself, confessed under the strain of his accusers, told them what he gathered they wanted him to tell them. Tommy Lee always tried to please. Anything for the approval of his accusers. He told them exactly what they told him to. And eventually, they fried his poor black ass.
I remember the Klan lined up on one side of the narrow street, the state troopers lined up on the other. Standing on the brown lawns of the black folks' neighborhood. Stomping the occasional rose bush. And the Justice Dept, international observers, marshals...to make sure the Klan and the Alabama state troopers didn't “defend” themselves from the outside agitators and nigger-lovers and blow away the lot of us!
It was easy to tell the Klanners from the troopers. They wore different uniforms.
The Alabama State troopers were not a jovial bunch. They stood feet wide apart, eyes concealed by reflector shades, with the butts of their shotguns resting on their hips and their fingers on the triggers.
Now, at that time I hadn't been to many of these Suthrun demo march things; a couple of big marches up in DC back a ways, but this was vastly different. For one thing, there were about a half-million less folks on my side. I wasn't really familiar with the potential for meltdown, even though it was staring me in the face only a few feet away, so I actually enjoyed talking with the fella I was walking with. I half believed those fuckin Kluxxers were mostly bluster. I didn't take into consideration the importance of their being liquored-up. I think my walking companion was as much an innocent as I was. I don't recall any laughter though. We just talked politics and weather. Someone asked if the troopers were allowed to have their fingers resting on the triggers of their shotguns. That question caught my attention.
This was before the blowout in Greensboro in '79, I've written about. But not long before.
Right next to Decatur, a town or two over, was where we vigiled. When we first got there we stopped at the house of this white farm couple, back-to-the-land hippie-type individuals, whose kids were enjoying the day's remaining light with some of the kids from the surrounding black farmers' families. Their colors were a match for the white train, only in that quiet yard, they represented peace and harmony, not nuclear apocalypse. A good platform to move on to the vigil. Children playing a game and laughing. Like that Matisse circle. Wasn't it Matisse?
I remember, browsing through a shelf of books over their immense stove, seeing a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous.
