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The next morning he felt, as he always did when chance laid him open to the world's fateful arrows and errors, that not only his civil, but even more his moral rights had been played with fast and loose by the minor officials of the various legalities he was subject to, fraternal, academic, municipal. In his drunken way he was going to demand redress, even if that redress would cost him in the same careless way: he was born to be a loser. Loser or not, though, he presented himself before the steps of the college administration building at eight o'clock in the morning, neatly dressed, shaved, clean, wearing the slacks, sweater, loafer uniform of his fellow men, and carrying a neatly lettered sign which said simply, as Morning said all his days, I PROTEST, meaning merely that he was protesting the world's treatment of him.
The administration had learned from other protests the best defense: they quietly, calmly ignored him in the way a father ignores his errant infant son. The administration was also in the process of ignoring four young Negroes who came each day with signs to protest the segregation rules of the college. The administration, adept at ignorance, also paid no mind to the eight or ten football players who appeared each morning at ten o'clock to formally spit on the Negroes who, if they blinked at this, were left curled in silent pain on the clean sidewalk, or dropped on the carefully clipped grass, or stretched over a neat hedge. But this was to be a different morning.
Just as the first Negro fell, the tall lean hungry end from north Alabama who had hit him found himself falling as Joe Morning landed square with both feet in the middle of his back. Morning became all feet and elbows, his frenzy the madness of righteousness, his strength that of surprise and holy anger, and the infidels fell about him in waves, and if he could have them away from his ribs, he might have stood them off until sweet darkness. As it was, he made them forfeit such an unholy price for his defeat that they left the other three Negroes alone that day, and from that day let the Negroes protest in peace.
So for the second time in three days, Morning woke beaten and bleeding slightly on that thin mattress, which still held the stink of his waste, bound and chained again, though on his back this time. Ah, even the fuzz is wearing thin, growing soft, he thought as he woke, and smiled, then touched his tongue to the stiff stitches in his split lip. Holy rage had eased the bitterness. He felt as clean as the lamb, washed in his own blood, but clean nonetheless, and he sang happy songs until he was released at five.
A civil-rights organization had bailed him out, and a sweet-faced, collegiate-looking cat from Cornell thanked him for his zeal and love, but chided him for resorting to violence, then bought him a beer. Partly because he wanted to throw it at his mother, partly because he needed a place to rest, but mostly because he was enchanted by this soft-spoken chocolate cat with a touch of a Yankee twang, Morning moved with the Negro into a small room off the war room in the basement of a Negro church. "Basements again," Morning said, "Always the lower depths for me," with laughter. He refused at first to even allow that non-violence had any positive possibilities; his plan was to bring the bluebellies back down the Mississippi, then let them march dreadfully to the sea, burning crops of white men in their wake. But Richard, the Negro, refused even to allow Morning to sing with them until he at least intellectually acknowledged that non-violence was the way, for now. So Morning did, mentally preparing himself for being spat upon and called niggerlover, but Richard sent him to a man in East St. Louis who then sent Morning and his guitar and his discontent off with a fund-raising group around Mid-Western and Western college campuses. So Morning sang with a Southern accent, and worked, and lived off checks sent secretly by his father instead of taking expenses from the organization, and he worked well except for a few lost weekends, or week days, depending on his moods. It was on one of these dark times, wandering about hilly San Francisco in the fog, that he stepped into the nightclub where sang the man called Linda Charles, and first acknowledged his fear.
But he forgot, as best as Joe Morning ever forgot anything, during the heat of the next summer. He marched in Birmingham, sat-in in Tampa, sang all over the Southland, sang about freedom, and all the while bound by his love for violence, and every step closely watched by Richard. He had to grab Morning in Tampa when a ski
In the fall he drifted to Phoenix with a chick he had worked with, and he lived off her and his guitar until January, then went back to the fund-raising scene. In San Francisco he stayed away from the club where he had seen the shimmering vision of Linda Charles, stayed away until he became conscious of his absence, then he went, sober, sweating, but she wasn't playing there. Relieved, he went in to exorcise her (him), and found himself enjoying the show. It was fu
The old doctor who set the bones that night gave Morning a long lecture on the vices of the world. "The devil wears many faces, son, many masks. Be forever on guard. Tempt him not for his strength is the strength of ten men," he said, forming the cast with white hands co
"Why do things always happen to me?" Morning asked Richard the next summer. "Why me?" and Richard answered, "They happen to all of us, man, so just stay cool." But coolness wasn't Morning's long suit, so Richard refused to let him demonstrate. Morning, in anger, moved to a more militant organization, and on the first sit-in of the summer at a dime-store lunch counter in Birmingham, he laid low a nineteen-year-old kid who only said Pass the salt, niggerlover. Then the kid's buddies moved in, and Morning left the civil-rights movement the same way he entered, swinging and kicking for holy hell.
Charged with felonious assault, Morning faced one to three years, but his mother, faithful Southern mother, had a cousin (in the South one has cousins everywhere) who shot pool with the judge. So instead of three years, he was exiled from Alabama, in effect. The charges were indefinitely postponed, but the case would be reopened if he crossed into Alabama to demonstrate for anything ever.
The anger he held for the judge's sentencing, he held until he was outside. Once again he walked away from his mother without a word, stopped long enough for his guitar and a flight bag, then, anger still his only impulse, he walked from downtown, out 3rd, all the way to the city limits before he stuck out his thumb pointed toward Phoenix. But anger doesn't lend itself to hitching rides: the action is too slow, the long waits while asphalt puffs in the sun and the sparse shade of a jackpine protects neither man nor angry beast against the hot, dusty winds trailing semi's. The time after midnight, which may be the witching hour but ain't the hitching hour, he stood at lonely crossroads, stood for hours that never end, then ran from side to side from road to road at the call of the headlights booming up through East Texas piney woods, hoping only for a ride to anywhere, and again the semi's roaring past like fast freights. Then the afternoon sun like lava on rocky West Texas hills and a man makes the only shade there is, fatigue and dust and sunburn like a mask eating his face, until finally he hasn't even a damn for the arrogant cars hissing past, slinging gravel at his hot feet. Then Phoenix rising in the heat waves as he watched from the back of a cotton-picker truck filled with Mexicans, and he was ready to lay his burden down.