Dreamer (6 page)

He stared at his (their) image in the mirror, remembering simultaneously with pride and pain, gratitude and guilty that of everyone in his family he himself had easily the greatest oratorical skills. They outstripped those of his own father, his grandfather, and, to be honest, everyone else he knew. Some
resented him for that. Down deep, he could not deny that his dearest friend, Ralph Abernathy, loved and bitterly envied the range and reach of erudition in his sermons. He did not want to recall how many times he'd poured himself, heart and soul, into his preaching only to have another, older minister with a room-temperature I.Q. clap him on the back when he was done, and say, with a smile that never reached his eyes, “Man, I hate you.” Or the jealous ones, no deeper than a dime, who talked about him behind his back as if he had a tail, and cornered him after his roof-raising sermons, and whispered this knife between his ribs, “No wonder them white folks want to integrate with you.” He'd never known exactly how to respond to their envy. He knew—and they knew—that although his gifts were a devastating weapon against racism, they separated him from them. The irony of his situation never escaped him: excellence brought praise—so often from whites—but also the danger of his becoming a pariah among Negroes if he didn't somehow soften the separateness, the chasm his talent created between himself and others. Most of the time he played by those cutting remarks, or said something self-effacing, or quoted Jesus in Matthew 19:17
(Why callest thou me good? There is none good but … God),
or he simply tried to do more for the bruised ministers who felt threatened by him, lavishly praising them to their congregations. In a democracy where all were purportedly equal, it was so important to do that, assuage the egos of those he'd left behind. What else could he do? At Morehouse he'd considered other careers—the law, medicine—until his junior year, when the Lord let him see how the Negro church, despite its emotionalism, might become a vehicle for the most sophisticated modern thinking. This, he realized, he could do. He could not sing like Belafonte, portray a character like Robeson, punch like Joe Louis, write a poem like Claude McKay, draw bitingly satiric cartoons like Ollie Harrington, or paint colorful, delicately balanced
canvases like Jacob Lawrence. He was called to preach. It was his talent, but oh my, what of those who had no talent to speak of?

He pulled a comb through his hair, brushed his teeth, clicked off the bathroom light, and stepped into the kitchen, where, as soon as he entered, he found Smith's odor—a commingling of tobacco and creosote—drifting sharply on the air. Coughing, he went back to the bedroom, carried his fan into the kitchen, and plugged it in on the counter. Then he opened the refrigerator, found a plate of Mama Pearl's delicious apricot rugelach wrapped in foil and a half-finished can of Coca-Cola, and took these hack to the table, where he nibbled and let his thoughts go where they would. To his first meeting of the day, with the Agenda Committee. To Chaym. And then to the more troubling stories in the Book. One especially bothered him. The tale of two brothers. One's offering God accepted, the other He rejected. Was not the one spurned, who brought murder into the world—by killing the source of that inequality—the first revolutionary to defy favoritism and an unjust authority? He let this unwanted idea unwind, moving him farther back to the revolt of angels led by one of ensorcelling beauty who would not acquiesce to servitude and an inferior status, for even in heaven there was a caste system. Seraphim, it was said, loved deepest; cherubim knew the most.

He pushed away his plate and rubbed his eyes, unwilling to think longer along these lines. A soft belch lifted from his belly, barely audible above the smear of noises from the street below—traffic, the hissing tires of a bus passing by. The kitchen clock read 5:30. Sunlight yeasted in the kitchen, slowly brightening the room and his spirits as well. He lit a cigarette and thought: yes, inequality was stitched into the fabric of Being. No one deserved greater natural gifts than others. But despite the fortuitous differences in men, they could volunteer to share one another's fate. They could—in fact,
should—rearrange the social world to redress the arbitrary whims of contingency, accident, and chance. If the fortunate did not help, rancor and bloodshed might never cease. The least advantaged had every right to break the social contract that had so miserably failed to meet their needs. They would rebel, riot as they were doing now in Chicago. For their own sake and survival, God's favored had to lift those on whom He'd turned His back.

Morning pushed aside the previous night's shadows. He stubbed out his cigarette in a bean-bag ashtray, considered again the case of Chaym Smith, then dug a finger into his mouth to dislodge a sliver of rugelach stuck in his dental work, feeling at last comfortable with this decision.

Twenty-four hours later, on July 18, Citizen King gave his consent. Most of that night, amidst billowing smoke from burning stores and ricocheting pistol reports in the darkness, I hastily loaded the trunk of my battered old Chevelle with cardboard boxes of film and files about the Movement and the minister. Amy agreed with King that it would be best to separate Smith from the city for a while. Removing him far from his old haunts, the locations that reminded him of his losses, might be just the caisson required for restoring his life. Downstate, in rural Jackson County (fondly called Little Egypt by locals who'd named their hot, dusty towns Cairo and Thebes after Old Testament cities), a few miles from Makanda, Mama Pearl owned a hundred-year-old farmhouse handed down from her father. For two weeks that would be, as Amy called it, our Nest.

Provided we escaped the South Side in one piece.

The riot's devastation spread over 140 blocks, spilling into Slumdale, and we had to get across town to Smith's room. The minister was now on the West Side, preaching brotherhood and peaceful revolution on streets that ran slick with blood. Black blood, as if in the city (any city) ritual acts of murder had to be repeated night after night to renew the city itself. I feared the fires might burn forever, akin to brimstone, for the influence of the neocolonial empire King so relentlessly criticized stretched from Southeast Asia to Rhodesia, Colombia to Watts. One block from the minister's place, the police were shoving women and children into paddy wagons. Teenagers tossed Molotov cocktails at squad cars. At the corner of Sixteenth two white patrolmen weighted down by duty-belts chased a black teenager in blue jeans and a baseball cap through clouds of tear gas eerily backlit by the blaze from a torched pawnshop. Looters spilled from the building, hauling away portable Motorola televisions, shotguns, bolt-action rifles, and radios piled high in wobbly-wheeled shopping carts.

When the boy slipped on broken glass from the store's shattered window the cops fell upon him, cracking his bones with a flurry of blows I felt echo through my own body. My stomach clenched. Spotting another looter, the cops took off, leaving the boy bleeding on the sidewalk. As in a dream, I watched myself running toward the spot where the boy lay rocking back and forth, his legs drawn up to his chest. He was blinded by blood streaming into his eyes. Teeth hung loose in his head. “Don't move,” I said. “Let me help you, brother.” I reached down, holding out my right hand so the boy could rise. Without warning, he kicked straight up at my knees, bringing me crashing to the sidewalk. I felt blows falling across my face, breaking my glasses. He buried his shoe in my stomach. I felt his fingers snaking through my
pockets, emptying them of my wallet, keys, coins. I thought,
All right, now he's finished
. But I was wrong. He began kicking me again, intent on killing me for the thrill of it. I could barely see, but I crawled to the curb, pulling myself along the glass-sprinkled concrete to a parked car, and rolled under it, only to feel his fingers tighten on my right ankle. He pulled me back into the open, bringing his heel down on my back. I knew then I was going to die. Just another casualty of the night's rioting. I saw him reach behind his back into the waistband of his trousers, and as if by magic a gleaming switchblade appeared in his hand, which he raised high above his head, his eyes glittering to slits as he chose the spot on my chest where he would bury the blade. Then, miraculously, I heard a crack like wood snapping cartilage. The boy cried out. Moments later, he was gone, blending back into the night, replaced by Chaym Smith, who stood above me, breathing heavily and holding a two-by-four he'd found in the street and shouting for me to give him my keys and get in the car before we all were mistaken for rioters and rounded up with the rest.

“Thank you—”

“
Sama-sama
.”

“What?”

“I said you're welcome, in Indonesian. Just get in the goddamn car, Bishop.”

“Chaym … if you hadn't stopped him—”

“Uh-hunh, I know. You'd be dead. C'mon, let's go.”

Smith slid over from the passenger side to the driver's seat and hunched over the wheel. Still shaken, unable to keep my hands from trembling, I gathered my things off the pavement and climbed in back behind Amy, who was holding a shopping bag full of King's old clothing. I fumbled through my coat, hoping I still had the three- by four-inch copy of the King James Bible, a gift long ago from my mother, which I
carried as a kind of talisman for times of trouble, or just to study when I rode the subway. Not that I really felt much anymore when I fingered the Books tissue-thin pages. Try as I might, I no longer could breathe life into the vision the Bible embodied—or, for that matter, into any system of meaning, though I desperately wanted to, and always kept the Book nearby out of habit, often just letting its pages wing open to a passage selected by chance, hoping someday it would speak to me again.

Amy turned round in her seat and removed my glasses, which were dangling off my face, then took one of the minister's handkerchiefs and held it against the fresh cuts on my forehead. “Oh, Matthew,” she groaned, “why didn't you stay by the car?”

“Yeah,” said Smith, “you're lucky I decided not to wait for you and came on my own. You owe me one, Bishop. Don't forget that. And what the hell d'you think you were doing anyway?”

“I was just trying to help,” I said. “He probably thought I was the police coming back.”

“Sure,” said Smith, “that's why he was cleaning out your pockets, right?” He laughed wickedly. “Guys like you got a lot to learn. You really do. Good thing you weren't in Korea with me. The enemy just loved would-be missionary types like you. Know what those crafty bastards would do if five of us were out on patrol? They'd wound two Yanks, knowin' that'd end the fight because it would take three men to get the injured back to the base. And we
had
to get them back, bein' Americans and Christians and all that. They counted on it. They saw it as a weakness that we couldn't leave our own behind. And you know what else I saw, Bishop? You know what they'd do when they killed a black soldier and a white one? They'd cut off their heads, put the white one on the
black man's, body and the black one on the white boy. It was a
joke
, okay? I saw that, and it showed me there's two kinds of people in this world. Predators and prey. Lions and
lunch
. You see it any other way, buddy, and people will chump you off.” He glanced back at the little book I held. “If you'd been through half of what I have, you'd put that Bible away and learn what time it is—or learn how to read it
right
.”

“That's unfair,” said Amy. “Matthew was just trying to help that boy.”

“Yeah, and you
saw
what happened. Some people can't be helped. I know that. You reach down to pull somebody up, he's liable to drag you down to the bottom with him, then spit on you to boot. Did I hear you call him
brother
?” Smith chortled, his head tipping back. “You didn't even know his name! Did you call him that 'cause he was black, or was that a church thing? You ever
thought
about what brothers are really like? Romulus and Remus, say. Or Jacob and Esau? How they can hate each other, especially if one is doing better? See, if I were you, I'd forget about that brotherhood malarkey, and remember what they said during the French Revolution.
Fraternité ou la mort
. What I'm saying—and you may not like this—is that in the Struggle,
who
you are is less important than
what
you are: a splib, an outcast united to others by oppression, by blood, and let me tell you, buddy, that's one frail, forced confederacy, with some
brothers
and sisters who can be downright scary when they want to close ranks against the racist enemy, some of 'em all but saying,
Be my brother or I'll kill you
!”

“No,” Amy said, shocked. “How can you say that? I thought you said you wanted to preach.”

“What'd you think I was just doing?”

“I mean,
be
a right and proper minister!”

“Oh … well, I did. Once.”

“What about now? Last night you talked differently. You were almost begging for help. But tonight you don't sound like the same person at all. Which are you?”

Smith was quiet, his hands squeezed round the steering wheel at nine and three o'clock. Then he rummaged through his trouser pocket, found a linty, flecked stick of Doublemint gum, and stuck the wad into his cheek. “Sometimes I don't know,” he said. “Maybe you can help me figure that out.” He looked sheepishly at her. “I'm sorry, I guess I didn't know what I was saying. It's been like that since I was at Elgin. Can you forgive me?”

At that Amy softened. Her profile from where I sat dissolved from irritation to sympathy, as if it was the minister himself who'd appealed to her for understanding, seeing how he'd looked in a flickerflash trompe l'oeil uncannily like King when he apologized. For an instant I could have sworn Smith was playing her masterfully like a finely tuned lyre, one keyed to her (all of our) affection for King, fluidly shifting from one mask to another as the occasion demanded, as if maybe the self was a fiction—or, if not that, a multiplicity of often conflicting profiles. He seemed full of Machiavellian deceits and subterfuges. To my astonishment, he glided from the tribal languages of the Academy to Niggerese, a skill most educated black men possessed (myself included), but in Smith's hands, black slang became a weapon used for startling effect, like tossing a grenade into the middle of a polite tea party. As he put rubber to the road, tear gas drifted into the car, the shock of inhaling it like breathing in burning coals or hellfire when it filled the tissues of my lungs. I pressed one hand over my mouth, but I couldn't breathe or see. Smith gave more gas to the Chevelle, gunning it through an intersection, the speedometer riding sixty, then he stomped on the brake and began to skid. Up ahead, an elderly barefoot black man, wearing only wrinkled blue pajamas,
held his bloody forehead and stepped blindly into the beam of the Chevelle's headlights. Smith cut the wheel hard, running the car onto the sidewalk. A mailbox sprang up in the way, and he cranked the wheel again, passing just close enough to throw gravel against the man's kneecaps but leaving him otherwise untouched as the car slammed through another intersection and at last came to rest in front of Smith's building.