It was the British way, Jasper thought resentfully; family connections were more important than talent. His father had fallen victim to the same syndrome, and in consequence was still only a colonel.
‘What will you do?’ Daisy said.
‘Emigrate,’ Jasper said. His resolve was now stronger than ever.
‘Finish college first,’ Daisy said. ‘Americans value education.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Jasper said. But his studies had always come second to his journalism. ‘I can’t work for St Julian’s News under Valerie. I gave in gracefully last year, after Sam beat me to the job, but I can’t do it again.’
‘I agree,’ Daisy said. ‘It makes you look like a second-rater.’
Jasper was struck by a thought. A plan began to form in his mind. He said: ‘The worst of it is that now there won’t be a newspaper to expose such things as the scandal of college governors having investments in South Africa.’
Daisy took the bait. ‘Maybe someone will start a rival newspaper.’
Jasper pretended to be sceptical. ‘I doubt it.’
‘It’s what Dave’s grandmother and Walli’s grandmother did in 1916. It was called The Soldier’s Wife. If they could do it . . .’
Jasper put on an innocent face and asked the key question. ‘Where did they get the money?’
‘Maud’s family were rich. But it can’t cost much to print a couple of thousand copies. Then you pay for the second issue with the income from the first.’
‘I got twenty-five pounds from the Echo for my piece on Martin Luther King. But I don’t think that would be enough . . .’
‘I might help.’
Jasper pretended reluctance. ‘You might never get your money back.’
‘Draw up a budget.’
‘Pete’s on his way over here now. We can make some calls.’
‘If you put in your own money, I’ll match it.’
‘Thank you!’ Jasper had no intention of spending his own money. But a budget was like a newspaper gossip column: most of it could be fiction, because no one ever knew the truth. ‘We could get the first issue together for the beginning of term, if we’re quick.’
‘You should run that story about South African investments on the front page.’
Jasper’s spirits had lifted again. This might even be better. ‘Yeah . . . St Julian’s News will have a bland front page saying “Welcome to London”, or something. Ours will be the real newspaper.’ He began to feel excited.
‘Show me your budget as soon as you can,’ Daisy said. ‘I’m sure we can work something out.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jasper.
29
In the autumn of 1963, George Jakes bought a car. He could afford it and he liked the idea, even though in Washington it was easy enough to get around on public transport. He preferred foreign cars: he thought they were more stylish. He found a dark-blue five-year-old two-door Mercedes-Benz 220S convertible that had a classy look. On the third Sunday in September he drove to Prince George’s County, Maryland, to visit his mother. She would cook him dinner, then they would drive together to Bethel Evangelical Church for the evening service. These days it was not often he had time to visit her, even on a Sunday.
Driving along Suitland Parkway with the top down in the mild September sunshine, he thought about all the questions she would ask him and what answers he would give. First, she would want to know about Verena. ‘She says she’s not good enough for me, Mom,’ he would say. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘She’s right,’ his mother would probably say. Not many girls were good enough for her son, in her opinion.
She would ask how he was getting on with Bobby Kennedy. The truth was that Bobby was a man of extremes. There were people he hated implacably: J. Edgar Hoover was one. That was fine by George: Hoover was contemptible. But Lyndon Johnson was another. George thought it was a pity that Bobby hated Johnson, who could have been a powerful ally. Sadly, they were oil and water. George tried to imagine the big, boisterous Vice-President hanging out with the ultra-chic Kennedy clan on a boat at Hyannis Port. The image made him smile: Lyndon would be like a rhinoceros in a ballet class.
Bobby liked as hard as he hated, and, fortunately, George was someone he liked. George was one of a small inner group who were trusted so much that even when they made mistakes it was assumed they were well intentioned and so they were forgiven. What would George say to his mother about Bobby? ‘He’s a smart man who sincerely wants to make America a better country.’
She would want to know why the Kennedy brothers were moving so slowly on civil rights. George would say: ‘If they push harder, there will be a white backlash, and that will have two results. One, we’ll lose the civil rights bill in Congress. Two, Jack Kennedy will lose the 1964 presidential election. And if Kennedy loses, who will win? Dick Nixon? Barry Goldwater? It could even be George Wallace, heaven forbid.’
These were his musings as he parked in the driveway of Jacky Jakes’s small, pleasant ranch-style house and let himself in at the front door.
All those thoughts fled his mind instantly when he heard the sound of his mother weeping.
He suffered a moment of childish fear. He had not often known his mother to cry: she had always been a tower of strength in the landscape of his youth. But, on the few occasions when she had given in, and howled her grief and fear uncontrollably, little Georgy had been bewildered and terrified. And now, just for a second, he had to suppress the revival of that boyhood terror, and remind himself that he was a grown man, not to be scared by a mother’s tears.
He slammed the door and strode across the little hallway into the parlour. Jacky was sitting on the tan velvet couch in front of the television set. Her hands were pressed to her cheeks as if to hold her head on. Tears streamed down her face. Her mouth was open, and she was wailing. She was staring wide-eyed at the TV.
George said: ‘Momma, what is it, for God’s sake, what happened?’
‘Four little girls!’ she sobbed.
George looked at the monochrome picture on the screen. He saw two cars that looked as if they had been in a smash. Then the camera moved to a building and panned along damaged walls and broken windows. It pulled back, and he recognized the building. His heart lurched. ‘My God, that’s the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham!’ he said. ‘What did they do?’
His mother said: ‘The whites bombed the Sunday School!’
‘No! No!’ George’s mind refused to accept it. Even in Alabama, men would not bomb a Sunday School.
‘They killed four girls,’ Jacky said. ‘Why did God let this happen?’
On television, a newsreader’s voice-over said: ‘The dead have been identified as Denise McNair, aged eleven –’
‘Eleven!’ said George. ‘This can’t be true!’
‘. . . Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Carole Robertson, fourteen; and Cynthia Wesley, fourteen.’
‘But they’re children!’ said George.
‘More than twenty other people were injured by the blast,’ the newsreader intoned in a voice devoid of emotion, and the camera showed an ambulance pulling away from the scene.
George sat down next to his mother and put his arms around her. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.
‘Pray,’ she replied.
The newsreader continued remorselessly. ‘This was the twenty-first bomb attack on Negroes in Birmingham in the last eight years,’ he said. ‘The city police have never brought any perpetrators to justice for any of the bombings.’
‘Pray?’ said George, his voice trembling with grief.
Right then he wanted to kill someone.
*
The Sunday School bomb horrified the world. As far away as Wales, a group of coal miners started a collection to pay for a new stained-glass window to replace one smashed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
At the funeral, Martin Luther King said: ‘In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers.’ George tried to follow that counsel, but he found it hard.
For a while, George felt public opinion swinging towards civil rights. A congressional committee toughened Kennedy’s bill, adding the ban on employment discrimination that the campaigners wanted so badly.
But a few weeks later the segregationists came out of their corner fighting.
In mid-October an envelope was delivered to the Justice Department and passed to George. It contained a slim, bound report from the FBI entitled: Communism and the Negro Movement: A Current Analysis.
‘What the fuck?’ George murmured to himself.
He read it quickly. The report was eleven pages long and devastating. It called Martin Luther King ‘an unprincipled man’. It claimed that he took advice from Communists ‘knowingly, willingly and regularly’. With an assured air of inside knowledge it said: ‘Communist Party officials visualize the possibility of creating a situation whereby it could be said that, as the Communist Party goes, so goes Martin Luther King.’
These confident assertions were not backed up by a single scrap of evidence.
George picked up the phone and called Joe Hugo at FBI headquarters, which was on another floor in the same Justice Department building. ‘What is this shit?’ he said.
Joe knew immediately what he was talking about and did not bother to pretend otherwise. ‘It’s not my fault your friends are Commies,’ he said. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
‘This is not a report. It’s a smear of unsupported allegations.’
‘We have evidence.’