hand. I can’t remember if blood was streaming from the stump as I stooped to pick the finger up with my good hand. I assume it was, though all I can be certain of is that I was trying not to faint and that the Southern cop opposite me had a terrified look on his face.
That cop may not have been older than I (I was twenty-two), but he was about a head taller and a lot broader. Only minutes before he had been pointing angrily past my wife Dyanne at Bruce Dinkins, the thirteen-year-old African-American kid in the back seat of the Corvair, demanding to know what “that boy” was doing in our car.
We were on the way to integrate the segregated bathhouses of Myrtle Beach, but I wasn’t in a hurry to tell the cop that under the circumstances. Already I felt guilty about dragging young Bruce along on the enterprise. Dyanne and I had made him the lead in our student production of A Raisin in the Sun, and he regarded us as gods from the North, but this situation had spun out of control. Bruce probably blamed himself when the junior redneck dropped the jack at my feet.
We’d had a flat and, lacking our own jack, had flagged down a highway patrol car. The young cop had seemed happy to oblige us until noticing our racially mixed group. He turned surly, muttering, “Y’all do it yerself,” with his eyes fixed on the young teenager. But I didn’t know how to use the jack and had barely gotten it up when the whole car came down on my hand, breaking my finger off at the base.
Now Bruce was standing there watching one of his gods potentially bleed to death. I urged the shell-shocked cop to drive me to the nearest hospital. “Don’t get blood on my hat,” he said, referring to the pristine Stetson on the seat beside him, as we barreled toward a small clinic in the town of Clinton. Dyanne waited with Bruce at the side of the road for a tow truck to come. When I got to the hospital, the receptionist asked for my address and emergency contact. I hesitated. The hospital was all white. Was it actually still segregated, I wondered? This could be a big mess. But I didn’t have a choice. I told them to call the man who ran our program back in Sumter. I didn’t bother to mention that he was the cousin of Martin Luther King.
I then slumped against the wall and nearly passed out, feeling as if I were living my own low-rent version of Edward Albee’s play about the death of Bessie Smith. At least I was still alive, unlike Andy Goodman, my childhood best friend from New York’s progressive Walden School. He’d been shot the previous year by the Ku Klux Klan in a racial incident that inspired the film Mississippi Burning. There hadn’t been a day that summer when his murder was far from my mind.
Minutes later I was being wheeled into an operating room in that tiny clinic in rural South Carolina. I have never been religious, but I have a fleeting memory of saying a short prayer—before the anesthesia put my lights out—that the Southern doctor sewing my finger back on had been trained at some fancy out-of-state medical school.
Even though I’d had my occasional dreams of martyrdom-lite—being sprayed with power hoses, say, or even stung gingerly with cattle prods—an amputated finger was more than I’d bargained for. I’d signed up for the Yale Southern Teaching Program in the spring of 1966 full of idealistic images of Freedom Riders singing “We Shall Overcome.” This was going to be the summer when I grew up socially and politically. After all, I was now a full-fledged civil rights worker, engaged in the greatest struggle of the era.
And for a while it had gone well. Dyanne and I had done our bits registering voters on rural black farms, teaching African-American history to schoolkids in the “colored” part of Sumter and even organizing the first production (albeit truncated) in that part of the South of that seminal drama of black family life, A Raisin in the Sun. On weekends we would motor around neighboring states, once visiting the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee office in Atlanta in search of black history materials. There we ran into two of the more famous young idols of the period—Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond. The exceptionally handsome and charismatic Bond—now president of the NAACP—was then making his first run for a congressional seat. He showed me a leaflet he planned to distribute to voters with the symbol of the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama. It was the first time I had seen that famous sign of Black Power—though I had heard about it—and felt hurt when Bond rejected my offer to go precinct walking with him. He apparently didn’t need a white boy in the black districts of Atlanta. I tried to understand. I had other things to do then, other ways I could serve the cause of racial equality.
This, however, was all cut short by my encounter with a redneck cop on my way to integrate Myrtle Beach. But was I actually the victim of a civil rights incident? Or had I just been a clumsy urban graduate student unable to operate a simple automobile jack without bringing the car down on my hand? What would I tell my friends and family when I got home? The whole affair was ambiguous.
My life before then had been more sheltered than I wanted to admit. Dartmouth College, where I had spent my undergraduate years, was a good school, but painfully far from the action at a time when I correctly surmised the world was about to go upside down. Dartmouth in those days wasn’t even coed, a sure-fire prescription for social retardation, though at least I had a girlfriend at Skidmore.
I’d tried my best in high school to be ahead of the curve—wearing sunglasses, black turtleneck, and beret, in the emerging beatnik style—but the results were marginal. I was the youngest member of my Scarsdale High class and even being the first of them (probably) to smoke grass (with a local jazz musician who was teaching me to play the drums and called joints “medicated cigarettes”) didn’t amount to much. Nor did being the only one to witness Jack Kerouac reading live at Hunter College auditorium (circa 1959). My eyewitness tale of the Beat Generation icon slumped over the lectern, waving a bottle of Scotch while holding forth from the pages of The Subterraneans and beckoning the young Allen Ginsberg—then resembling a bespectacled yeshiva bocher from a road show Fiddler on the Roof—to join him on stage was of interest only to a tiny minority of like-minded Scarsdale High School classmates.
We were the ones trying to be superficially cool, listening to Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan on Symphony Sid’s late night radio or, in the case of the folkie set, Joan Baez, but actually dreaming of normal teenage things like losing our virginity or getting into our college of choice.
I failed at the latter, only making the waiting list for Harvard, and just barely achieved the former before arriving at Dartmouth, having lost my cherry over summer vacation to what I thought was a desperately aging hooker (she could have been thirty) in a walk-up off the Place Clichy. “J’ai un étudiant!” she shouted as we climbed the stairs. At least she hadn’t used the more demeaning élève, declaring me a student and not a “pupil.” Perhaps she guessed I was college-bound.
Of course, this was still the very early Sixties—not yet what we’ve come to call “The Sixties.” Dartmouth when I arrived had much the same atmosphere as Scarsdale High, though it was far from New York and its Greenwich Village Mecca, to which I would escape from the suburbs any chance I had in high school. The student body consisted of a lot of innocent jocks, a few nerds-before-their-time—mostly in the math department—and some preppies who didn’t make it into Princeton. But there were exceptions; there always had been. My father had gone to Dartmouth and introduced me to his classmate Budd Schulberg ’36 at a Yale game when I was about twelve. I knew even then this was the kind of Ivy graduate I aspired to be, assuming that I would graduate and not dare to go the full bohemian route like Scott Fitzgerald—to drop out (or be dropped out) in my junior year.
I searched out these eccentric types the moment I was on campus, but they were upperclassman and seemed inaccessible to me. One of them, Stephen Geller, cut a swashbuckling figure not only because he directed a production of Waiting for Godot and made his own student film (unheard of then), a burlesque of Bergman’s Seventh Seal, but also because he came from Los Angeles and his father worked in The Industry (an arranger for Tennessee Ernie Ford, as it turned out). Geller knew people who actually
