The decaying, downtown shopping section of memphis—still another Main Street—lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King’s funeral, under a siege. The deranging curfew and that state of civic existence called “tension” made the town seem to be sinister, like some long considered and carefully constructed film set of alienation, breakdown, catastrophe. The scene was empty, yet alive with possibilities for appalling drama. In the silence, the sudden horn of a tug gliding up the dark Mississippi made one jump. The hotel was a tomb, shabby, poorly staffed by aged persons, not grown old in their duties, but newly hired, untrained, depressed, wornout old people. The march was called for the next day, a march originally planned by King as a renewal of his efforts in the Memphis garbage strike, efforts interrupted by a riot the week before. Perhaps there was fear, and yet a humidity of smugness seemed to hang over the white people. Curfew, National Guard, dire warnings, kids home from school, bank and ten-cent store closed: if one was not in clear danger there seemed a complacent pleasure in thinking WE have been brought to this by THEM. “You! You there in the yard. You git back in here!”
Beyond and beneath the glassy beige curtains of the hotel room, the courthouse square was spread out like a target, the destination of next day’s march. All night long little hammer blows, a ghostly percussion, rang out, hammering together the structure for the Monday ceremony. The stage, slowly forming, plank by plank, seemed in the deluding curfew emptiness and silence like a scaffolding for the last beheading. These overwrought and exaggerated images came to me from the actual scene and from a painful crush of childhood memories: Memphis was a Southern town in which a murder had taken place. The killer might be over yonder in that deep blue thicket, or holed up in the woods on the edge of town, ready to come back at night. Here in Memphis it was not the killer, whoever he might be, that was feared, but the killed.
Not far from the downtown was the leprous little hovel where, from the unimaginable toilet window, the assassin could look down upon the new and hopeful Lorraine Motel. At the Motel on Sunday the Memphis Negroes, dressed in their best, filed up and down the ramp, glancing shyly into the room which King had occupied. At the ramp before the door of the room, where he fell, there were flowers, glads and potted azaleas. All over the Negro section rickety little stores, emptied in the “consumer rebellion,” were boarded up, burned out, or simply empty, with the windows broken. The stores were, for the most part, of great modesty. Who owned that one? I asked the taxi driver.
“Well, that happened to be Chinee,” he said.
Shops are a dwelling and their goods and stuffs and counters and cash registers are a form of interior decoration. Sacked and broken, the …
