In the car parked outside a church in the Mississippi Delta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner took a bite of cold chicken. In a packed day of several stops, this was the best opportunity the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would find to sneak in a quick lunch. It was also the best opportunity for Curtis Wilkie, the 27-year-old reporter for The Clarksdale Press Register, to ask King a question: “Are you ever frightened?”
King was there to stir up support for his Poor People’s Campaign and its planned march on Washington for economic justice. Wilkie had followed him from stop to stop that day, including the tense situation they had just weathered in Marks, a tiny town surrounded by cotton fields.
King was about to take the pulpit of Silent Grove Baptist Church when a disheveled white farmer walked in through the front doors. The farmer reached into his pocket – Wilkie braced himself – only to pull out a $100 bill. He handed it to King. The Civil Rights leader thanked the farmer, who turned to the crowd of 200 and insisted that, contrary to what others told them, Ain’t nobody hungry in Mississippi. Some tense words were exchanged, but the farmer finally left, the standoff defused.
From the shotgun seat of the car, King answered Wilkie. “No, I’m not frightened,” he said. “I move without fear because I know I’m right. I’d be immobilized if I was afraid.”
Wilkie believed him. This was not bravado. King had shown no fear in the confrontation inside the church.
“Besides,” King said, “the climate of violence is gradually decreasing in the South.”
It was March 19, 1968. A little over two weeks later, King would pause his Poor People’s Campaign to make a detour to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. There, as Wilkie would write more than 50 years after that interview in the Delta, “the modern prophet had an appointment at his personal Golgotha.”
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and everything in Oxford, Mississippi, is closed.
That includes the expected public institutions: the post office, the schools, the Lafayette County Courthouse in the center of the square. But Ajax Diner, City Grocery, even the bibliophile’s Valhalla, Square Books – they’re dark today, too. A winter snowstorm had blanketed the town overnight, shutting everything down. With Ole Miss students still on winter break, everything would feel empty anyway. But now? It’s almost eerie.
Driving slowly south of the square, just a few blocks from Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, I turn off Lamar, the main drag, and onto a block between streets named Lincoln and Grant. (To further complicate the terrain, Mississippi still pairs MLK Day with the state’s observance of Robert E. Lee’s birthday.)
I pull into the driveway of a handsome single-story cottage, firewood stacked next to the unlocked front door. I let myself in.
I have been here many times. I’ve petted that old gray Persian cat giving me the evil eye from the kitchen counter. I’ve admired and studied the stacked and stocked bookshelves, filled with first editions of novels and biographies and history, most with broken bindings or torn dust jackets. I hear the words come on back, so I walk through the house to its main bedroom.
That’s where I find, in a leather armchair at the foot of a neatly made bed, my reason for coming to Oxford.
He looks much the same as he did when I last saw him, 10 months earlier. Maybe a little thinner. The full head of unruly white hair that resembles that of trial attorney Gerry Spence, or maybe Lyndon Johnson after he left the presidency and let his freak flag fly. The thick beard that, when paired with the scally cap he sometimes wears, makes him look like the featured guest at a Galway poets festival.
And then there’s that voice, one that makes every joke, story, insight, or profanity somehow sound gentle and authoritative at once: coming down from Mount Olympus, only whispered. He says the words that felt like a medal pinned to my chest the first time I heard them, years ago.
“Hey, buddy,” says Curtis Wilkie.
