They watched it go by and began to follow it, some of them, vaguely.
The guardsmen wore standard issue helmets and were putting on gas masks now and the troopers outside the bus terminal wore white ridged helmets that resembled construction hard hats.
Rosie Martin watched them get closer, local police in pairs scooping up the demonstrators and taking them out to flatbed trucks.
Blacks with shirttails flying, looking back as they ran, and maybe the woman on the porch could smell a burning in the air.
The gas masks were bulky devices with goggle eyes and swollen nosepieces. The guardsmen looked insect- eyed, stepping into a floodlit area near the black college campus. The masks had flap mouths and filtration chambers that bulged out of the left side like pineapple tins.
A man lay spread-eagle outside the terminal, being patted down by troopers.
A man was being tug-of-warred, a young black in a striped shirt, two guardsmen gripping an arm and a leg and a marcher holding the other leg and trying to pull him back into the crowd outside Mount Calvary church.
Somebody threw a bottle and the woman on the porch heard it break in the street. She stood up and tried to see what was happening in the dark out there. Voices, people running, people coming this way and then turning back.
'Tell you what I'm saying. I'm saying there's nothing in the world to worry about despite the evidence all around you. Because anytime you see black and white together you know they are joined in some effort of betterment. Says so in the Constitution.'
Another bottle broke.
And in the terminal Rosie Martin saw them drag a woman out the door facedown and headfirst.
The guardsmen moved into the crowd outside the church, holding their bayoneted rifles at port arms, and the gas came blowing in behind them.
In the terminal a cop started clubbing people on the arms and legs. Rosie watched him calmly, counting the number of sit-in marchers before he got to her.
The charismatic speaker said, 'They're spraying, I'm talking. I'm gonna keep on talking as long as I got a larynx that can function. Black people love to rap,' he said.
The marchers sat down, they scattered, some entered the church, some ran the other way, and the guardsmen dragged others along the ground toward the barricaded street.
At the terminal the cops had their billy clubs out and were moving in a stoop among the demonstrators, who sat hunched forward with their arms over their heads.
The gas rolled through the streets scorching people's eyeballs, making their eyeballs feel sucked out by the heat. The streets were filled with running men and women. The gas rolled in and they strayed down alleys, feeling their way, chests tight, coughing in spasms, or chose to walk, some of them, shambling half blind toward the church.
Rosie knew she'd be taken off to jail on a flatbed garbage truck and then put in a crowded cell and given a piss-smelling mattress because this had been the scuttlebutt for days.
Blacks came running down the dark street and the men who'd been lounging against the car began to stir finally. The man with blue suspenders went into a frame house and the man with the straw hat got into the car and rolled up the windows and then got out again and the other men slid off the fenders and went to stand on the porch where the woman stood looking down the street.
Women wanted the same prison conditions the men got. This was a definite issue.
Guardsmen massed around the armored van, insect-headed, and looked down the dark alleys for students throwing rocks or men out of the bars, the juke joints, still holding cans of Colt 45, and they heard the speaker say, 'It's all a question of mind over matter. They don't mind and we don't matter.'
Rosie was dragged on her ass out into the street and spun around on her britches and left there. She spotted sawhorse barricades and police cruisers, people milling and scuffling and photographers popping flashcubes, and she thought she caught the first taste of gas.
People stagger-ran toward the church through ranks of guardsmen.
She saw the one-legged man on crutches, a familiar figure over weeks of bus rides and marches across state lines. And the man being beaten. She saw a slim man being struck by a cop with a billy club, hit three, four times, a pause, then hit again, white eyes showing.
The woman on the porch felt the air burning and went inside and the men went inside with her. Young men went running past, students and marchers, and one of them stopped long enough to fling a bottle the other way.
The gas, called CS, made people dizzy almost: at once and caused a stinging on the body where the skin was moist.
Rosie smelled the gas, she tasted it before she saw it. A trooper had a man bent over the trunk of the cruiser, in an armlock, and another trooper stood nearby holding two shotguns, his own and his partner's who had the armlock on the marcher.
The armored van moved slowly through the streets, searchlights swiveling on the roof.
The church was filling up with people trying to escape the gas, which rolled through the alleys off Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi on a muggy summer night with radios playing and children standing at the windows of shotgun shacks, watching men run through the dark.
Rosie started running. She saw the cop beating the man methodically, three, four blows and then a pause, and she started running toward them.
The gas had a radiance, a night glow, and the men in insect masks came walking out of the cloud, alive and bright.
The man who'd rolled up the windows of the car, a sixty-year-old in a white shirt and straw hat, proceeded to walk down the unpaved street toward his house, tasting the gas and putting his hat over his face and accidentally kicking a pop bottle someone had thrown, lying unbroken in the dust.
She watched the cop strike the man on the head and arms, three, four blows with his billy club and then a pause, and she pushed through a couple of sawhorses and ran directly toward them, feeling fast and light and unstoppable.
The gas rolled through the streets in tides and drifts, narrowing down alleys and fitting into confined spaces.
She had no idea what she planned to do when she got there, about four seconds from now.
Charles Wainwright was on the phone to a client in Omaha, soothing, stroking, joking, making promises he could not keep. He felt a measure of detachment from the matters at hand, his eyes slightly aswim in the agreeable yield of a long liquid lunch.
He heard himself saying, 'Off the top of my head I would estimate, Dwayne, well be able to present this campaign, timewise, in four and a half weeks. Four weeks minimum. We just switched our best art director to the account. Three weeks with heavenly intervention. God keeps an apartment in New
Just then Pasqualini, the art director, stuck his head in the door.
'What is death?' he said.
Wainwright smiled and shrugged.
'Nature's way of telling you to slow down.'
Charlie tossed his head to indicate laughter and Pasqualini headed down the hall to tell the joke to some of the other senior account men, Charlie's peers, the guys with the snap tab collars and chromium smiles-they drank gibsons straight up and said, Thanks much.
In fact Charlie thought the joke was beautifully suited to these surroundings. In the Times every morning, wasn't it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?
Charles Wainwright was an account supervisor at Parmelee Lock-hart
