Memory of a March

[Pamela Troy]

(Written the day after the huge MLK Day peace march we had here in San Francisco in 2003.)

On the front page of Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco's municipal website, SFgate, is a helicopter shot of Saturday's peace rally. Market Street is black with people, packed so tightly that the sidewalk has vanished and the street itself appears to have widened to the foot of the buildings that line it. It is astonishing. It is glorious. My husband and I were in the thick of that mass, moving slowly down the street towards the rally at the Civic Center. We saw a sign being held high a little ways ahead of us. "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!" it said, and beneath those words were a line of arrows, pointing straight down at the crowd.

The march actually began as we walked down Nob Hill. Small clumps of people moved with us across and down the street, before us and behind us, some of them carrying banners, some with knapsacks and bottled water, some with nothing but their pockets or their purses. There were groups of young people in their twenties and late teens, often dred-locked or with brightly colored hair, trotting down the hill, leaving the rest of us behind in their eagerness to get downtown. There were slower moving, ordinary looking families with children, or younger couples pushing strollers or with a child riding the shoulders of the father. There were elderly people walking arm and arm in ones and twos and threes. At Grace Cathedral, a crowd milled on the cathedral steps among green signs and balloons. The environmentalists would be marching to the rally down Hyde Street. "Are you going to the march?" I heard a woman calling from the steps, and someone ahead of us waved before continuing down California.

Downtown, the pavements in the streets around Market were dotted with wandering demonstrators, signs lowered and bumping against their legs as they ducked into stores to buy water and snacks before the march, or negotiated their way to a destination further up or Market Street, avoiding the crowds. Once we reached Market we realized that getting to Justin Herman Plaza, where it was supposed to begin, would be difficult. We moved into place and waited among the people already massed the street, four blocks ahead of the plaza.

Progress was slow. A few steps, then stop, a few more steps, then stop and wait for five minutes, a few more steps... It didn't matter. Every now and then a tide of roars would move up or down the street. We would hear it approach and wait for it like someone bracing for a wave, and once it hit everyone we and everyone around us would be shouting. There was no anger in the sound. It was more like exultation.

The sun was out, but it was shining through a fine mist spread over the city, and the weather had turned cold in the past two days. Whenever we stepped into a square of sunlight shafting down to us between the tall buildings, we could hear the people around us sigh with relief. "It's cold! My God, who'd of thought it would be so cold in a crush like this!" said a buxom, tattooed girl in a sleeveless leotard behind us. Once when I looked up, I could see the air sharply divided into light and less light, the shadow of a building cast onto the haze above our heads. I could also see people watching us in a few windows, men in coveralls who looked like janitors in one high rise, in another a trio of Asian women dressed identically in white blouses and dark skirts. At one point, the helicopter that had been crisscrossing the sky over the march hovered directly above us for a few moments. Our section of the crowd roared again, this time with a note of defiance, all looking up, some waving, some shaking their fists. We could hear the ripple of noise we'd created moving up the street.

Around us our neighbors shifted and changed. There was a slender man in his fifties, clean-shaven and quite ordinarily dressed except for the old bowler hat perched on his thick gray hair. The round-faced teenage boy next to him with the close-cropped, spottily peroxided haircut lowered his cell phone to say, "Mom's exactly where I'd said she'd be, Dad. Up ahead two blocks." "Well, tell her we'll be there in ten minutes," said the man in the bowler. "At this rate? I don't think so!" "OK, 30 minutes." A few minutes later, I turned to see that they were gone, replaced by a row of women in their forties, walking with their arms linked, and a young man with a little girl riding his shoulders, her hands twined in his hair.

On one side of us I could see a papier-mâché dove held high, its wings moved slowly up and down by a string pulled from below. On the other, a tall puppet glided, raising and lowering its long arms, a figure of peace with eyes lowered and tears painted on its cheeks. And there were signs of course, and banners. "BUSHIT!" "PEACE NOW!" "WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER" "NO BLOOD FOR OIL!" "SKATEBOARDERS FOR PEACE," "GREEN!" "DROP BUSH, NOT BOMBS!" "PREEMPTIVE PEACE!" On the periphery of the march at the base of the buildings, people were moving more quickly, visible only as signs eddying swiftly in one direction or another. "REPUBLICANS FOR PEACE," read one. Another read simply, "INTERNATIONAL WORKERS LABOR UNION" and when its owner later stepped unexpectedly into our path he was revealed as a tough looking, bald, fireplug of a man with a Wobblie jacket and a sign around his neck that proudly proclaimed, "FAT UGLY MEN FOR PEACE."

Naturally there was street theater. Someone in a business suit and a rubber George W. Bush mask waved a copy of Mein Kampf at the passing parade. A few blocks later, a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty was tied to a lamp-post and force-fed something from a gasoline can by a man dressed as Uncle Sam, while another masked Bush exhorted the crowd to "Buy! Buy!" "Stop the parade," someone yelled near Fourth Street, "Homeland Security coming through!" We paused and watched as a group of official looking people wearing sunglasses and carrying clipboards moved across the street, leading a larger group of bound, gagged prisoners confined within a lasso of yellow police tape. "YOU look suspicious!" one of the sun-glassed people snapped at a middle-aged man a few feet from us. "What's your name?" and he paused to poise his pen over his clipboard, waiting for an answer. "Watch what you say or you'll be next!" "Come join us!" "You're next!"

The sound of drums was constant. Drum circles lined the parade route and marched along with the crowd, their beat sometimes punctuated by the long, tenor hoots of plastic horns, or in one case, a conch shell blown by a white-haired, elderly hippie in a headband and leather vest. Rows of young people sat on the high islands of bus shelters, hammering irresistible tattoos on the plastic roofs, and marchers paused to clap or to turn in a brief dance step before passing. As we neared the Civic Center the pace had picked up, but it was still slow. The crowd was simply too massive.

"Moooooommmmaaaa!" complained a little boy in a stroller just behind me. He caught my eye when I turned to look and pursed his lips at me in a weirdly adult expression of exasperation. His mother was too busy adjusting a sign on his older sister and scolding her for dropping her bag of gorp to hear him. "Mooommmmaaaaa!" "Well what now?" His mother stopped to bend over the stroller and listen to him and they fell behind and disappeared. My husband broke off a piece of the chocolate almond bar we'd brought and handed it to me. The scent of cooking food wafting on the air from the Civic Center Plaza was making everyone hungry.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were directing the parade traffic at the turnoff to Civic Center, tall men in wimples and garter belts and high heels, their faces as cleverly whitened and painted as clowns. "Peace now!" said a bearded, rather good-looking sister, his red chest hair visible beneath his low-cut sequined top, "Move to the right," and he pointed with one heavily muscled arm. The crowd slowed again to a crawl, packed tightly into the narrower, shabbier street that led to the Civic Center. The fundraisers were waiting there, standing beside barrels and exhorting the marchers. "Help us work for peace!" they called. In a window overlooking the street, a dark haired little girl watched the parade while her mother, a lovely woman in a sari, knelt beside her and pointed. The girl waved, and the crowd sprouted a crop of hands waving back.

I looked ahead again and was startled by a poster showing a pair of spread buttocks. It was a sign being brandished by the one counter-demonstrator I saw, a stout man standing alongside the parade route near the Jack-in-the Box. "KISS MY ASS, OSAMA-LOVERS!" it read. The counter-demonstrator looked profoundly angry and unhappy, and no wonder. The few marchers I saw who noticed the sign just laughed and passed him by. Beyond him a choir of gray-haired women stood, music open before them, serenading the crowd, or trying to. Quakers? Unitarians? There was something old-fashioned about the melody of the hymn to peace they were singing, that conjured up thoughts of past protestors in past wars going back almost a century. They were fighting a losing battle with the low roar of the crowd and the drums, and they kept pausing and starting again, so I couldn't catch all the words. And anyway, how easy can it be to sing when the singers are all smiling so broadly?

At the Civic Center there wasn't a crowd so much as a solid block of people confronting us and far, far off in the distance, a speaking platform and the roofs of various food stands. Neither of us were sure about the time, though the sunlight told us it was afternoon. Our legs ached and we were hungry. A black speck of a figure appeared on the distant platform and suddenly we could hear a voice over the nearby loudspeakers, and an answering roar from the crowd. Helicopters hovered overhead.

We walked back up the hill towards home on Polk Street. About two blocks from California, across the street from us a long-haired bearded man in a tie-dyed shirt sat at a plastic sidewalk table, his dog nearby, resting its chin in its lap. As we went by, the man, noting the slogan on my t-shirt, raised his hand in greeting and called to us.

“Do you think anything will stop the sonovabitch?”

“We’ve got to go on the record!” I shouted back.

And we did.

[bigtree]

1. nice read

thanks for posting