NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

And now he wanted me to do something I’d never done in my life.

“I want you to do some PR,” he said, after the pleasantries were done. “We’re going to march on the Capitol on Sunday, and we need someone to coordinate the media.”

I have always shied away from public relations the way a little kid shies from brussel sprouts. Despite my career in journalism it’s not something I’m good at, because in public relations the story doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the principals and the reporters (or that’s the way I look at it). But I agreed to do it.

The job was simple. I would e-mail a press list Tim sent me. I would count the replies and direct them to the right location. If anyone asked questions I was Georgia for Democracy.

I’d met Tim on the Dean campaign. He was already a legend there when I took my wife up to Burlington as part of a vacation, in May, 2003. Georgia for Dean is doing this, they’re doing that, they’re doing the other, said Joe Trippi, the campaign manager. If every state group were like Georgia for Dean we’d win easily.

When I went back home I found the Georgia for Dean Web site and helped out, blogging and even going to an activist training forum at which Trippi spoke. Even after The Scream (as famous in its way as Edvard Muench’s, although no one would steal it) I stayed loyal to the cause, watching the New Hampshire returns at a brew pub with Tim and a few others. But when the smoke cleared, I went back to my desk. I never gave a dime to Kerry. Tim, however, stayed at it, organizing as Georgia for Democracy, working hard through the general election.

And losing everything.

Not only were Democrats slaughtered throughout the state, but voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the Constitution that denies Tim, and those like him, their civil rights. An old friend once told me, “better passive tolerance than active intolerance,” and Tim now knew what that meant.

Yet Tim kept fighting. I wondered sometimes whether he was another Dr. King or another W.E.B. DuBois, who fought the rise of Jim Crow and was broken by it. If Tim Cairl asked me for a favor, any favor, I’d do it gladly.

So a few days after our talk I kissed my wife, hugged my kids, and headed for the rally on MARTA. I was surprised by the crowd on the train, but reasoned the Falcons were popular. (I forgot they had played the Sunday game the previous day, on Saturday.) When most of the crowd got out at Georgia State I thought little of it, because I was heading to Five Points.

I walked up Peachtree, braced myself for the wind against the canyon of Marietta Street, and huddled into my coat against the foot traffic. When I finally looked up I was in shock.

Woodruff Park was full. I mean FULL. I glanced toward the fountain at the north end, saw a sheet hand-painted “press” in red, and decided the only way through was to walk west on Marietta, then up Broad Street to Auburn. I pushed my way along Auburn until I reached the sheet, my work station. It turned out to be a farm tractor pulling a flatbed trailer with a fence around it, often used on pick-your-own farms to haul families out to the pumpkin patch.

The flatbed already held a few shivering men and women. I introduced myself and offered to get coffee, then walked a few feet to the Ground Urban, where I bought one of those “coffee boxes” with plastic cups that are so popular. Filling one cup with cream and sugar, I headed back, having done my PR best. As I poured I even smiled.

From the top of the flatbed we had a good view of the stone stage, around the water fountain north of Auburn, from which we’d be addressed. We were a good ways back, but Tim had found a decent speaker system.

My Congressman, John Lewis, was the featured speaker. He talked about sacrificing for freedom, of being beaten at the Pettis Bridge, of Bull Connor, his hoses and dogs. He talked of the girls murdered by the bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and the Freedom Summer when the three civil rights workers were killed. The sound system wasn't much, but the vast crowd was hushed. I thought briefly of how those on the Washington Mall felt when Dr. King made his famous speech, over 41 years before.

“And on one day, on one horrible day, we have seen more murders done to our people than in all those dark days put together,” Lewis concluded. “But on this day, on this day of resurrection, we resolve that they will not be forgotten, that they did not die in vain, and that we will Take Our Country Back!” The watchword of the Dean campaign drew a thunderous roar.

With that the march began. Our tractor was in the middle of it. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before in Atlanta. The plan had been to go up the sidewalks along Decatur Street, through Georgia State, in hopes of getting a glance, then going under the railway on Piedmont, past the MARTA station toward the Capitol.

But there were too many of us. We filled Decatur Street from wall-to-wall. A second phalanx headed south on Peachtree Center Blvd., through Underground Atlanta toward Martin Luther King.

We were a swarm, a great heaving mass of humanity. Where had these people come from, I wondered, as the photographers around me snapped their pictures. I suddenly remembered an early Christmas present, pulled out my new cameraphone, and got a few snaps off. Liveblogging was out, because there was no place to put my lap. I would just have to witness, and get this down later.

The big surprise came when we approached the Capitol Building itself. It was surrounded by troopers, all wearing helmets and all (it appeared) armed. Our trailer pulled up to the sidewalk on Washington Street. I saw Tim walk across the sidewalk, holding what looked like a box of computer paper.

“I hold here petitions, collected over the Internet in the last five days, demanding you investigate the events at Doraville and take action to make certain it won’t happen again,” he said, as loudly as he could. Then he placed them on the step and took one step back, expecting someone to take them.

The phalanx, however, did not break to allow him entry. Instead a loud, familiar voice came from behind the phalanx, through a speaker system that dwarfed anything we’d had at the park. It was the Georgia Governor, Sonny Perdue.

“You are hereby ordered to disperse,” he said, while the box lay unopened. “By the authority given me by the President and the Department of Homeland Security, under Executive Order 10990, I am placing this area under martial law and ordering you to disperse. Anyone who fails to heed this order will be seized as an enemy combatant!”

Some of the people in the back headed away…some of those in the front made a futile charge at the cops. I hung on to the press tractor. Whoever was driving it (I never introduced myself) began to slowly withdraw. I heard shots, I saw tear gas. I stayed down.

I didn’t see much else through the haze of the gas. We pulled off north, toward a railway underpass, and gradually the scene faded. When the tractor got to Decatur Street I jumped off and walked east, quickly. I got back on the MARTA at the King Memorial Station and pretended I hadn’t been there.

The tear gas had nothing to do with my tears.