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“We had known for a while that I was being followed by the Klan,” Tim said one night at the kitchen table. “Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had just disappeared . . .” He took a drag on a cigarette. “The guys they tortured and killed?” I asked. “Yeah.” He nodded, exhaling smoke. ”Though at first we didn’t know what had happened to them.” He was talking now about memories stirred up by grass he and I had smoked half an hour earlier. There was more to Tim’s reaction to the doormat-flag than exaggerated caution. He was in pain and his confusion and paralysis had a pathological edge. I learned its source during one of the nightly kitchen table talks in which I got to know him. He grew up in the South and he and his wife were among the first white members of the Congress of Racial Equality in New Orleans. His gaunt face was framed by longish dark hair that slanted across his forehead and flared out both sides of his neck. Over deep-set eyes was a prominent brow now pinched hard. Quietly, slowly, precisely, he continued, “Carol and I had a friend at C.O.R.E. She was black but could pass for white. One night, she and I went to a White Citizens’ Council meeting.” He took another, harder drag on the unfiltered cigarette. “We sat at the back…God it was hot …“He exhaled smoke. “It was night …and it was televised…and the lights made it even hotter.” He picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue and ruminated on it. I became impatient. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What was the point of that? Why did they attack you in the meeting? Why not on a deserted road or some place like that?” “The whole thing was on television, and the attack was an excuse to show my face. It was like a … a wanted poster.” He stubbed out the butt in a saucer. “The idea was that some random Klansman would recognize me somewhere, maybe in a convenient place . . .” “Oh...” I said. “They may have been inhibited from acting directly because the search for Schwerner and the others was still going-on.” “Oh, I see…” “They have a special hatred for ‘race traitors’.” “Like a white southerner in the civil rights movement?” I said, describing him. “Yeah,” he said and took a pack of cigarettes from a breast pocket and dug out another. “A little while later,” he continued, “they found the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.” He put a cigarette in his mouth and picked up a matchbook and tore out a match. “Carol knew Schwerner pretty well. They had worked together.” He struck the match and touched the flame to the cigarette. “Anyway, after that attack on me, and then their deaths…” He whipped out the flame. “She insisted we leave the South.” And tossed the smoking match on a saucer. “I insisted that, if we did, we come here.” Rednecks were a bond for Tim and I. We both grew up among them, though I recognized our California descendants of the Gold Rush losers weren’t as lethal as his descendants of the Confederacy. Tim was twenty-five, six years older than me, and I would always wonder: had I been old enough, would I have had the guts to face his rednecks in the great crusade? “Did you see that Art Hoppe column yesterday?” I asked during another stoned kitchen table conversation. “I don’t like Art Hoppe,” Tim said with surprising vehemence. “Why, what’s wrong with him?” “I don’t like his . . . cartoon segregationists . . .” “Yeah, but . . .” “They are not stupid! That is a serious miscalculation.” I recognized the frontline veteran’s respect for a formidable enemy and felt chastened and kept quiet. Tim was a hero of the only war that mattered, the last front, the home front against the fascists. And because of this status, and despite his intermittent buffoonery and selfishness, he was always, ultimately, for me, a hero. Only child of two PhDs, Tim attended Quaker elementary schools in Philadelphia until his father, a liberal activist minister, was made president of a seminary in the South. Tim had a jeweler’s eye for the facets of a political issue and a sober, calculating savvy which prevented him from becoming an actual communist, even though, by the time he graduated from college, he idolized Mao Tse Tung and was inevitably drawn into the civil rights movement. Whenever he talked about “the Movement,” he displayed an utter seriousness, a lucidity of purpose, that reminded me of my father and my uncles when they talked about World War II. That seriousness was paradoxically at odds with Tim’s most distinguishing trait: a child-like glee, an ability to hit the high notes of joy. Tim in the Haight was righteousness out of its armor and awkwardly learning to gambol. An eager conduit of the smallest enthusiasms, he could be as excitable and unrestrained as a puppy and as graceless. He was always stumbling over something or spilling it. In short, he was totally devoid of cool, which isn’t to say he wasn’t hip, because he was the living essence of that. Tim’s dark side: an incredible selfishness. An only child, he could not deny his sharkish appetites. An intimate was someone he could take advantage of; for instance, his wife. He once provoked her into stabbing him while he was on LSD and on his way to meet Ruth (who he had recently fallen in love with)at the Avalon Ballroom where they would see The Blues Project. Carol was trying to save their marriage as she attempted to talk him out of the date. They were in the kitchen and she didn’t know he was on acid. Eventually, his giddy indifference drove her to reach for a knife drying in the dish rack. He fended her lunge, cutting his arm. He then disarmed her, bandaged the cut, and left her sobbing on the couch. Tim was always at the center of the action. Wherever that was. After high school, he hitchhiked to Venice, California, then a thriving beatnik capital. After college in California, he and his wife returned to the South for the beginning of the civil rights movement. And now he was in San Francisco for the rise of the Counter Culture and the Summer of Love.
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