 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||
 |
|
|||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past...
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened...
- T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"Prologue:
Extract from "Terror Campaign, 1961", by Rachel Levy.
November 1:
Montgomery, Alabama, the Greyhound Bus Station lounge. Already conquered territory: From wall to wall, the great white banner cries its message –KEEP AMERICA WHITE AND ARYAN -
RUDOLPH HITLER FOR PRESIDENT.Over the ticket counter portraits of the four American Party grandees glare at the travelling public: Rudy the Candidate, Gerald K.Smith the hopeful Veep, Senator Adolf Hitler pere of Illinois, Wallace, the Cotton State's favourite son. So close to power now, with the election fourteen days away... Here, in the cyclone's eye, its so easy to believe in the reality of the onrushing nightmare.
I have three hours to wait for the New Orleans bus, which should ferry me off, I hope and pray, to comparative safety, south, oddly enough, while the shock troops of the Aryan Vengeance careen north with their sawn off shotguns and their thick knotted ropes. Rachel Levy, will you be alive to see the end of the '61 Campaign trail, or will you just be another strange fruit on the lynching tree, a final ripening of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed?
All about me on the plastic lounge seats are draped the carless poor whites of Alabama: ravaged youths, hair plastered to their foreheads with sweat, which oozes down their knotted necks and the hairs of their bare thick arms; a quartet of Air Force ensigns in toy neat blue; two old men with tanned leather hides, snoring under wide brimmed hats; a couple of overdressed shabby-genteel ladies, red lipstick a gashed wound in taut gleaming faces. Along the walls a small knot of subdued black travellers, standing: three young men in casual white shirts, a family of five, pa in black suit and tie and soft hat, mother in her Sunday best, two small boys wriggling in collars starched for the trip, a silent pigtailed girl whose eyes roam, bewildered, over the waiting room, drawn despite herself to the two plain clothed Klansmen at the entrance with their swastika armbands and yellow-cross badge on their lapels. Their arms folded in easy dominance, guarding the captive land. Oh lord, is this the future face for us all? Where will it end? How did it all begin?
:: unpublished :: links :: about :: contact :: sitemap ::
