Free Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Page B

effort. Yes, he was furious at Abernathy for making him wait these crucial minutes while the secret stuff of his brain was disclosed to his mind.
    Abernathy came in about forty minutes late, several other Negroes with him, his press secretary, Bernard Lee, wearing a tan suede collarless jacket, sullen and composed behind an evil-looking pair of dark sunglasses, possessor of hostility which seemed to say, “I got the right, man, to look at you from behind these shades, but you deserve no chance, man, to look at me.”
    Abernathy was of different stuff, deep, dreamy, sly, bemused—one could not detect if he were profoundly melancholy, or abominably hung over. He spoke in a measured slow basso, slow almost beyond measure, operatic in a echoes, but everything he said sounded like recitatif for he seemed to read his statement with more attention for the music of the language than the significance of the words. “If the Republican Party can afford this lavish convention, and the Administration can spend billions of dollars in a disastrous war, and America can subsidize unproductive farms and prosperous industries, surely we can meet the modest demands of the Poor People’s Campaign,” he read, and the logic was powerful, the demands well nailed to the mast, but his voice lingered on “lavish” as if he were intrigued with the relation of sounds to palpable luxuries he had known and glimpsed, “disastrous” appealed to him for its sibilants as though he were watching some scythe of wind across a field, so “subsidize” was a run of the voice up and down three steps, and “unproductive‘” hung like the echo of a stalactite. He was a man from Mars absolutely fascinated with the resonance of earthly sound.
    He had begun by apologizing to the Press for being late, and had said this in so deep and gracious a voice that pools of irritability were swabbed up immediately, but then he trod over this first good move immediately by saying, “Of course, I understand much of the convention is running behind schedule.” The one indisputable virtue of the convention hitherto had been the promptitude of each event—how casual and complacent, how irresponsibly attracted to massacre! that he must issue the one accusation all courts would find unjustified.
    But the reporter was soon caught up in trying to form an opinion of Abernathy. He was no equal, it was unhappily true to see, of Martin Luther King. The reporter had met that eminent just once: King in a living room had a sweet attentive gravity which endeared him to most, for he listened carefully, and was responsive when he spoke. He had the presence of a man who would deal with complexity by absorbing its mood, and so solve its contradiction by living with it, an abstract way of saying that he comprehended issues by the people who embodied them, and so gave off a sense of social comfort with his attendance in a room. Abernathy had no such comfort. A plump, badgered, perhaps bewildered man, full of obvious prides and scars and wounds, one could not tell if he were in part charlatan, mountebank, or merely elevated to monumental responsibility too early. But his presence gave small comfort because he was never in focus. One did not know if he were strong or weak, powerfully vibrant and containing himself, or drenched in basso profundos of gloom. “Poor people,” he intoned, with his disembodied presentation, “no longer will be unseen, unheard, and unrepresented. We are here to dramatize the plight of poor people...”—his voice went off on a flight of reverberation along the hard “i” of plight. Later, he asked for “control by all people of their own local communities and their own personal destinies,” incontestable as a democratic demand, but no fire in the voice, no power to stir, more an intimation of gloom in the caverns of his enriched tone as if he must push upon a wagon which would