1968--King is dead

We left Cypress Gardens at six,
drove all night in a black '62 Chev,
skirting the Gulf,two of us sleeping,
two of us tuned to an all-night dj.

King had been shot in Memphis,
the radio buzzed all night long.

Just before five we stopped
at a sleazy café just west of nowhere.

In tall black letters
a sign on the door said, 
"WE SUPPORT OUR LOCAL KLAN."

They seem a delusion,
a dozen fat white men,
some in bibs, their visored caps
pointing a straight line up the counter,
yellows and golds and bright greens
through smoke from fat black cigars
jammed in their red mouths,
while drinking and laughing,
singing for fair on the same old song--
over and over and over:

"Ship all the n______s 
back to the monkeys,"

a pot-bellied juke box
jerked out from the corner
just for the party.

King was dead.

Four boys from Iowa 
eat a tasteless breakfast 
served up by a thin, black cook
in a tall, white hat.

They watch and listen,
pay and leave.

Morning has come.
The sun settles the mist
till it lies like silt on the coastline.
In the windstill bayou dawn, 
the white Iowa plates 
on that '62 Chev
feel somehow strange.
_______________________ 

That's how I remembered that night, fifty years ago, and tomorrow morning. Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. Very early the morning, I ate a stack of hot cakes cooked up by a black man in a boozy party I could not have imagined, a Klan all-nighter, somewhere on the Gulf coast. It was Spring Break, 1968.

This little sketch is how I remembered that night just a few years later.