What I won't forget

The night
Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, four of us--small-town white boys--followed the
Gulf of Mexico's eastern shore on an all-night trek from south Florida to New
Orleans. It was spring break, 1968, only a few months from the summer that
seemed, even at the time, to change all of our lives.  Somewhere down
south we heard of Dr. King's death over the AM radio in that '62 Chevrolet with Iowa
plates.

We were on our way to New Orleans' French Quarter, four lusty guys, tired and
sunburned, traveling along some several hundred comfortable miles south of our
own Calvinist enclaves homes.

All night long, from the time we'd scarfed down cheap hamburgers for late
supper, through the next morning's first whispered glow, the radio kept
spilling news stories about Dr. King's death--statements being read by just
about anybody important enough to merit media time, memorials and obituaries
that may well have been produced and taped months before a man by the name of
James Earl Ray had even known about a garbage strike in Memphis, the event
which brought King to the motel balcony where he would be shot.

The sun wore a heavy mask of Gulf fog that morning when light finally opened
our eyes to the coast line. I don't remember where we were exactly, but the
chore of keeping ourselves awake made us pull over at the some greasy spoon,
however seedy--we weren't sinless ourselves.

It was still before six, the morning dressed in haze. Two guys kept right on
sleeping in the back seat, but two of us walked up to the door of a roadside cafe
and found it very much awake.

What we saw inside remains as the most vivid picture I took during 1968 spring
break--a party, the place full of rednecks, open bottles standing on tables
even though the place was not a bar.

A sign up
near the cash register told us that all proceeds that day would go to the Klan.
The jukebox wailed out music I'd never heard before, half rock 'n' roll,
half-country, all thick with racist spit. I remember wanting to write down the
words as we waited for our hotcakes. But I was afraid of men I'd never seen
before, men another man knows instinctively as dangerous