Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

Now 416-J walked hurriedly down to the river's edge. He made for an old junkyard near the bridge and hid in the weeds among the rusted husks of abandoned cars, keeping his ears tuned all day for the sound of men on horseback or the yelping of bloodhounds. Every so often he turned on his little transistor radio for bulletins announcing his escape. So far, so good: the newscasts mentioned nothing, although soon the Missouri Corrections Department would put out a "Wanted" notice with a modest reward of fifty dollars for his recapture.

Once darkness descended, he crossed back over the river and began walking west along the railroad tracks toward Kansas City--which was a ruse, for he had no intention of going to Kansas City. The prison officials knew he had family in St. Louis (about a hundred miles due east), and they would naturally suspect that he'd head in that direction. By walking west toward Kansas, he hoped he could buy some time.

So for six days he clomped west along the railroad tracks, eating his stash of candy bars, drinking water from the occasional spring, and lighting campfires with matches he stole from an old trailer. "I looked at the stars a lot," 17he said later. "I hadn't seen them for quite a while." One night a couple of railroad crewmen startled him as he warmed himself by the fire. He told them he'd been hunting along the river and had gotten drenched. They seemed to buy his story and left him alone. But then another night he saw state troopers patrolling the rural road that paralleled the tracks, and he was sure they were on his scent.

By the sixth day, however, he began to sense that the heat was off. He kept listening to his radio and was surprised that the newscasts made no mention of his escape. Somewhere along the way, he found a file or some other suitable tool and tried to rub away his prison number--00416--from the housing of the radio.

On the sixth night, he saw a little store in the distance, its lights gleaming invitingly. Not wanting to look like a desperado, he cleaned himself as best he could and shambled inside. He bought sandwiches and some beer--the first real food he'd had since the enormous mess of eggs he'd fixed for himself in the prison bakery.

He was ravenous, footsore, and irritable from a fugitive week of tense nerves relieved by little sleep. But now, as he ate his sandwiches, he might have allowed himself a smirk of satisfaction. A bread box! He had to savor it, had to congratulate the classic beauty of the feat. Jeff City was an impossible joint to break out of--that's what he'd always heard, that's what most of its denizens believed. In the institutional memory of the place, there had only been three known escapes--and they had all failed.

He'd been stuck inside Jeff City's sad gray ramparts for seven years, and he had another eighteen hanging over him. While there, he'd organized his life around the goal of escape--it was the central idea that had focused and sustained him. He'd scrimped and schemed in the shadows of a deliberate and tenacious obscurity. He'd perfected a kind of anti-identity, so that no one would notice him when he was there--or miss him when he was gone.

That night, 416-J called his brother 18and arranged a rendezvous spot. Then he hopped an eastbound freight train. 19Feeling what must have been some mixture of anxiety and delight, he rolled past the Jeff City prison complex. How many jittery nights had he lain awake in his prison cell, listening to the whistle of locomotives running over these same tracks that now gave him flight?

Sprung from Jeff City's walls, he let his mind begin to churn with thoughts of other jobs, other projects of greater complexity and ambition. But now he was heading home, in the direction of St. Louis.

BOOK ONE

IN THE CITY OF THE KINGS

When I took up the cross I recognized its meaning ...

The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on .

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1967)

1 CITY OF WHITE GOLD

IN EARLY MAY 1967, three hundred miles downstream from St. Louis, the citizens of Memphis stood along the cobblestoned banks, enjoying the musky coolness of the river. Seventy-five thousand people, dressed to be seen, waited in the twilight. They'd come from all the secret krewes 20--from the Mystic Society of the Memphi, from Osiris and RaMet and Sphinx. They'd come from all the clubs--Chickasaw, University, Colonial, Hunt and Polo, the Memphis Country Club--and from the garden societies. The good families, the old families, in their finest James Davis clothes, bourbon flasks in hand, assembled for the start of the South's Greatest Party.

The brown Mississippi, wide with northern snowmelt, was a confusion of crosscurrents and boils. In the main channel, whole trees could be seen shooting downstream. A mile across the river lay the floodplain of Arkansas, a world of chiggers and alligator gars and water moccasins that lived in swampy oxbow lakes. On the long sandbars, feral pigs ran among graveyards of driftwood and rotten cypress stumps.

But in the clearings beyond these wild margins were hundreds and hundreds of miles of cotton fields. Cotton as far as the eye could see, row after perfect row. Gossypium hirsutum . White gold, mined from the world's richest alluvium.

Memphis was built on the spot 21where the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, in 1541, became the first European to lay eyes on the Mississippi River. The city was founded 278 years later by Andrew Jackson and a group of his investor cronies, and named for the ancient Egyptian capital near the Giza pyramids. Memphis didn't really take off, however, until the dense hardwood forests along the river began to be cleared in the mid-nineteenth century, finally making farmable the flat, rich floodplain known as the Mississippi Delta. As the country slid toward Civil War, Memphis became the capital of a region that was constructing a last frenzied iteration of Southern planter society. If the Delta came late to cotton, it came to it with a vengeance, and with all the defiant desperation of someone following a wounded creed.

Cotton had grown along the Nile near the original Memphis, and cotton was what modern Memphis had come to celebrate on this fine humid evening of May 10, 1967. In the fields of Arkansas, and down in nearby Mississippi, the little darlings had already begun to push through the dirt, the crop dusters were preparing to rain down their chemicals, and the old true cycle was in the offing. Now it was time for Memphians to pay homage and to bless another season in cotton's splendid realm.

The thirty-third annual Cotton Carnival, Memphis's answer to Mardi Gras, was about to begin. Later in the week, there would be luncheons, trade shows, and charity balls. A beauty contest would declare the fairest Maid of Cotton. Many thousands would visit the giant midway and attend parades with elaborate floats, some of them spun from cotton, depicting the gone-but-not-forgotten Old South and the treachery of the long-snouted boll weevil. All week there would be parties on the rooftop of the Peabody Hotel, where mallard ducks lived in a scaled-down mansion when they weren't marching down a red carpet to splash around in the lobby fountain.

Tonight was the high pageant that kicked off the whole week--the majestic arrival of the King and Queen, sitting upon their thrones with their sequined court all around them, on a great glittery barge that was scheduled to nudge into the Memphis harbor shortly after sunset. It was a celebration not only of cotton but also of the peculiarly settled life that thrived on it--the life of dove hunts and pig roasts and debutante balls, the genteel agrarian world that could still be found in the fertile realms surrounding Memphis.