Reflections at the Lorraine Hotel

  

The modesty, almost the meanness, is what strikes you when you see it, the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel—so familiar from the photo everyone has seen of Dr. King’s friends standing over his body and pointing across the street at the boarding house where the shooter had made his lair—and that room with the thin carpet and the shabby curtains where he stayed. Memphis, is a modest city, Beale street notwithstanding, an American southern city; in the center of town, in the courthouse square—a sweet quiet little green space—a plaque commemorates the first mayor of the town, who proclaimed that his most cherished accomplishment was being able to look out over this little park and watch the birds. The streets around the Lorraine Hotel are modest, too, crooked little streets with grass overgrown in the cracks in the pavement, tumbledown houses and burnt red brick buildings in need of some repair. Millions of people have by now passed this way, through these streets, but it does not have the feel of a tourist destination—at least not as Washington or New York or Chicago would conceive of one.
   Maybe only someone from Washington could be struck by the modesty of the place. How did one suppose an entourage of black men might have been travelling in Tennessee, in 1968, when they weren’t entirely welcome? Or maybe it is the immodesty of our time, when our “leaders” and “spokespersons” are bloated, gorgon egos riding on digital airwaves, tweets, disconnected entirely from the real, deteriorating American landscape they claim to speak for. The hotel, that balcony, the humble room—room 306—preserved as the culminating exhibit in the National Civil Rights Museum to which the hotel is attached, resonate with the street-level realness of the time. King and his friends were there in Memphis, not to attend a conference or to christen a monument or a new building or to receive an award or enunciate a new social theory of race relations. He was there to support a sanitation workers’ strike.
   It’s been said that 1968 was the worst year in American history (I think our time may now make that claim obsolete) but there is a compelling sense of the real, the particular, about the battles of that year and the years leading up to it, as if the period exhales the breath of its excited, hyperventilating participants. Christian theology speaks of a “scandal of particularity”—the outrageousness, the unacceptability of the idea that the divine would make itself manifest into an unwashed human being, in a time and place, dusty backward ancient Palestine. The Bible is repetitive throughout in its assertion that God works in just this way; the arc of salvation history is bent not by people making the loudest noise.
   Writing in Harpers in 1961 James Baldwin said of MLK that “he has succeeded, in a way no Nero before him has managed to do, to carry the battle into the individual heart and make its resolution the province of the individual will. He has made it a matter, on both sides of the racial fence, of self-examination.”
   Baldwin’s writing from the period, too, exhales that breath of the real, like steam coming off the hot summer pavements. I first read his magisterial essay, “The Fire Next Time”—actually published as two separate tracks (“My Dungeon Shook” and “Down at the Cross”)—as a teenager in the 1970s when so much about that period seems to have exhausted itself. How I came across his work I don’t know—it may have been my mother’s influence. Or it may have been simply because I was, at the time, deeply enamored of everything about “the sixties” and felt that I had been born ten years too late; one book may have led to another and to Baldwin.
   If King insisted the “race problem” was a problem of the human heart, Baldwin in his writing took it further to say that it was more explicitly a problem for white people to overcome; it was for white people to liberate themselves—and for black people to insist that they do so—from what Baldwin called “the racial nightmare” of white supremacy. What Baldwin couldn't tolerate was the notion that white people could comfort themselves with the idea that they--we--had done some great deed by letting them eat at the lunch counter, as if it were a privilege, ours to confer. (Contemplate this--something I learned from George Will: when Jackie Robinson made his appearance in the major leagues, and the Dodgers would eat at a restaurant or tavern, some places would throw away all of the plates and silverware on which Robinson might have eaten after the team left. There is a great essay to be written, if it hasn't already been, about the relationship between prejudice and the enormous human fear of germs, of bacteria and of disease) . Anyway, the liberation that Baldwin wrote about (and King testified to) was something more far reaching than than integrated school or lunch counter.
   I have uttered in my time some embarrassingly callow, shallow and fatuous things about race from my protected status—I argued in my twenties in the 1980s that institutional systemic racism was over—so I’ll resist it now, except to observer that perhaps it was too much to expect. I don’t know. Or perhaps the wheels are still turning. It is very hard to stand in front of that hotel, that balcony, in those humble streets of Memphis and not think sadly of the distance that has been travelled, or not, since that time to ours—Black Lives Matter, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, school shootings, Charlottesville, Donald Trump. Baldwin asked us in Down at the Cross to consider the face and eyes of a southern sheriff (and he must have had Alabama’s notorious Jim Clark in mind) for a glimpse at the spiritual bankruptcy that results from the white American grip on its delusion. I shudder to think what Baldwin would make of the men and women who stand in vast throngs at Donald Trump’s rallies braying for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.
   What will become of us? “Here we are,” Baldwin wrote in the thunderous conclusion to Down at the Cross, “at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise….If we do not falter in our duty now, we be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”