After the Tall Timber by RENATA ADLER Read Free Book Online

Miss Hayden?
    “Yeah. Girl came into the Selma hospital this morning, fifteen hundred dollars in her wallet. She’d slept with forty-one.”
    “Forty-one what?” Miss Hayden asked.
    “Niggers,” the young man said.
    “And what did she go to the hospital for?” Miss Hayden asked.
    “Well, actually, Ma’am, she bled to death,” the young man said.
    “Where did you hear that?” Miss Hayden asked.
    “In town,” the young man said. “There’s not much you can do, more than keep track of everything. It’s a big mess.”
    “Well,” Miss Hayden said, “I think it’s going to get better.”
    “Hard to say,” said one of the boys as they drifted back to their cars.
    At midnight in the camp, Charles Mauldin, aged seventeen, the head of the Dallas County Student Union and a student at Selma’s Hudson High School, which is black, was awakened in the security tent by several guards, who ushered in a rather frightened-looking black boy.
    “What’s going on?” asked Charles.
    The boy replied that he was trying to found a black student movement in Lowndes County.
    “That’s fine,” said Charles.
    “The principal’s dead set against it,” the boy said.
    “Then stay underground until you’ve got everybody organized,” Charles said. “Then if he throws one out he’ll have to throw you all out.”
    “You with SNCC or SCLC, or what?” the boy asked.
    “I’m not with anything,” Charles said. “I’m with them all. I used to just go to dances in Selma on Saturday nights and not belong to anything. Then I met John Love, who was SNCC project director down here, and I felt how he just sees himself in every Negro. Then I joined the movement.”
    “What about your folks?” the boy asked.
    “My father’s a truck driver, and at first they were against it, but now they don’t push me and they don’t hold me back,” Charles said.
    “Who’ve you had personal run-ins with?” the boy asked.
    “I haven’t had personal run-ins with anybody,” Charles said. “I’ve been in jail three times, but never more than a few hours. They needed room to put other people in. Last week, I got let out, so I just had to march and get beaten on. In January, we had a march of little kids—we called it the Tots’ March—but we were afraid they might get frightened, so we joined them, and some of us got put in jail. Nothing personal about it.”
    “Some of us think that for the march we might be better off staying in school,” the boy said.
    “Well, I think if you stay in school you’re saying that you’re satisfied,” Charles said. “We had a hundred of our teachers marching partway with us. At first, I was against the march, but then I realized that although we’re probably going to get the voting bill, we still don’t have a lot of other things. It’s dramatic, and it’s an experience, so I came. I thought of a lot of terrible things that could happen, because we’re committed to nonviolence, and I’m responsible for the kids from the Selma school. But then I thought, If they killed everyone on this march, it would be nothing compared to the number of people they’ve killed in the last three hundred years.”
    “You really believe in non-violence?” the boy asked Charles.
    “I do,” Charles said. “I used to think of it as just a tactic, but now I believe in it all the way. Now I’d just like to be tested.”
    “Weren’t you tested enough when you were beaten on?” the boy asked.
    “No, I mean an individual test, by myself,” Charles said. “It’s easy to talk about non-violence, but in a lot of cases you’ve got to be tested, and re-inspire yourself.”
    By 2 A.M., hardly anyone in the camp was awake except the late-shift night security patrol and a group of radio operators in a trailer truck, which served as a base for the walkie-talkies around the campsite and in the church back in Selma. The operators kept in constant touch with Selma, where prospective marchers were still arriving by