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  PRAISE FOR Dreamer

  —Dennis McFarland, The New York Times Book Review

  “[Johnson’s] important new novel … takes bold, creative risks, bringing off many unlikely feats, and [Johnson] is sage enough to let the story do most of the work. He delivers a lively tale that leaves the reader with enormous concerns to contemplate.”

  —Andy Solomon, The Boston Globe

  “Johnson … writes with a compelling profundity and power. Like Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” and the Gospel writers, Johnson takes us to a time, one within living memory, when a ‘dreamer’ among us saw love as our redemptive principle and strongest weapon before he ‘died for our collective racial sins.’”

  —John Marshall, Seattle Weekly

  “A deep look at the last two crisis years in the life of [King] … Johnson is an ambitious writer who is not satisfied with merely creating … passages of imagined thinking, however powerfully rendered.”

  —Bruce Barcott, The Seattle Times

  “Masterfully rendered set piece … writing so assured and compelling … even when you already know the ending.”

  —Meg Laughlin, The Miami Herald

  “A noble undertaking … what hooks you is the charity and magnitude of the philosophical message and how Johnson sticks with it…. Johnson can write about a tragic death and a universe ‘engraved with inequality’ and still manage to restore your faith.”

  —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

  “Ambiguous, Conradian eeriness … themes rich and developed by Mr. Johnson with his usual stylishness … consistent high quality of writing.”

  —David Hinckley, Daily News

  “Johnson … weaves both the hope and the doubt into Dreamer, a short but sweeping novel … for everyone in Dreamer, life comes down to a series of tests revolving around elements as common to King’s double and volunteers as to King himself: faith, love, hope, fatigue, doubt. Johnson marks these tests subtly and well.”

  —Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

  “Charles Johnson’s Dreamer is a beautiful and heartfelt novel of substance; intriguing and cleverly rendered, it has a plot that entertains even as it throws a light on the life of Martin Luther King during that epoch of America’s struggles with civil rights.”

  —James McBride, author of The Color of Water

  “Magnificent, and like everything Charles Johnson does, deep and funny. As a writer, he goes places few of us dare to go. He’s one of the most gifted writers I’ve read and is an inspiration to all writers.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

  “Compelling and profound, Dreamer is a book fully equal to its monumental subject, Martin Luther King Jr. Charles Johnson is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.”

  —David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

  “With this new book Charles Johnson confirms his position at the summit of American letters. Dreamer is an inspired and glorious achievement, infused with its author’s expansive wisdom, his vibrant historical and moral imagination, and most of all, his heart. It is a transcendent, brilliant book.”

  ALSO BY CHARLES JOHNSON

  FICTION

  Middle Passage

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Oxherding Tale

  Faith and the Good Thing

  CRITICISM

  Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970

  ESSAYS

  Black Men Speaking (coedited with John McCluskey Jr.)

  DRAWINGS

  Half-Past Nation Time

  Black Humor

  DREAMER

  CHARLES JOHNSON

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

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  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

  Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 by Charles Johnson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1999

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Designed by Brooke Zimmer

  Set in Fairfield

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  5 7 9 10 8 6

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

  Johnson, Charles Richard, 1948-.

  Dreamer : a novel / Charles Johnson.

  p. cm.

  I. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.O3735D7 1998

  813′.54—dc21 98-10201

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-81224-3

  ISBN-10: 0-684-81224-X

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85443-4 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-684-85443-0 (Pbk)

  eISBN 13: 978-1-439-12552-6

  To the memory of Lee Goerner

  of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James R. Ralph Jr.’s “Home Truths: Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement” (American Visions, Aug./Sept. 1994).

  I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to my agent, Anne Borchardt, for her brilliant advice; Dr. Rudolph Byrd for taking me to King’s birth home; poet Sharon Bryan for accompanying me to the King Memorial at the Lorraine Motel; Joyce Carol Oates for providing the Henry Adams definition of politics; Dr. Ricardo J. Quinones for placing in my hands a copy of his invaluable book, The Changes of Cain; Eknath Easwaran for his voluminous writings on the life of the spirit; to Guy Murchie’s The Seven Mysteries of Life; philosopher Scott Kramer for helping me remember the ’60s; poet Ethelbert Miller and filmmaker Jon Dichter for spiritual support; Gray Cassidy for his martial-arts expertise; Janie Smith for her hours spent typing the manuscript; and my wife, Joan, for her bottomless knowledge about the Book.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the books and people without whom this novel could not have been written. Of special importance are Stephen B. Oates’s superb Let the Trumpet Sound, David L. Lewis’s King: A Critical Biography, Lerone Bennett Jr.’s What Manner of Man, Coretta Scott King’s My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., James H. Cone’s Martin & Malcolm & America, John J. Ansbro’s Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind, Keith D. Miller’s Voice of Deliverance, David Garrow’s three-volume Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, Mark Lane’s Code Name Zorro, James Earl Ray’s Who Killed Martin Luther King?, John A. Williams’s The King God Didn’t Save, Julius Lester’s Search for the New Land, Noel Leo Erskine’s King Among the Theologians, volumes 1 and 2 of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James R. Ralph Jr.’s “Home Truths: Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement” (American Visions, Aug./Sept. 1994).

  I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to my agent, Anne Borchardt, for her brilliant advice; Dr. Rudolph Byrd for taking me to King’s birth home; poet Sharon Bryan for accompanying me to the King Memorial at the Lorraine Motel; Joyce Carol Oates for providing the Henry Adams definition of politics; Dr. Ricardo J. Quinones for placing in my hands a copy of his invaluable book, The Changes of Cain; Eknath Easwaran for his voluminous writings on the life of the spirit; to Guy Murchie’s The Seven Mysteries of Life; philosopher Scott Kramer for helping me remember the ’60s; poet Ethelbert Miller and filmmaker Jon Dichter for spiritual support; Gray Cass
idy for his martial-arts expertise; Janie Smith for her hours spent typing the manuscript; and my wife, Joan, for her bottomless knowledge about the Book.

  MEISTER ECKHART

  “The Pauper has to die before the Prince can be born.”

  GENESIS 4:5

  “But unto Cain and to his offering the Lord had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.”

  MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., Strength to Love

  “If you sow the seeds of violence in your struggle, unborn generations will reap the whirlwind of social disintegration.”

  GENESIS 37:19-20

  “Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say: Some evil beast hath devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

  PROLOGUE

  In the Upsouth cities he visited, violence followed him like a biblical curse, but one step ahead of his assassins. Despite his clerical vows, or perhaps because of them (I am come to send fire on the earth, Luke 12:49), he walked through a world aflame. Chicago in the hundred-degree summer heat of 1966 was the site for the special form of crisis his wing of the Movement produced: families divided, fathers at the throats of their sons, brothers spilling each other’s blood. Unhappily, I have the eloquence of neither Guido the Angelic nor Teresa of Avila, and so with each halting sentence I pray for the words to demonstrate how this was the beginning of his northern crusade to undo the work of the Devil. This was the battlefield, a modern plain of Kurukshetra, where in the midst of a shooting war between Richard Daley’s police and black snipers on the West Side (two were dead, hundreds were in detention), he composed that electrifying speech, “A Knock at Midnight,” read for him by friends at St. Peter’s Cathedral, seeing how he was stretched so thin, there in Chicago, that he couldn’t fly as scheduled to Geneva and instead spent three hellish nights rushing from one burning slum to another, pleading until 4 A.M. with both armed camps for peace. It is … midnight in our world, and the darkness is so deep that we can hardly see which way to turn.

  He was tired by the time the Movement reached the North. His life had always belonged to others. For ten years he’d been God’s athlete, traveling nearly eight million miles (one-fourth the distance to Mars) back and forth across a country as divided as it had been during the Civil War, giving thousands of speeches in churches where he was celebrated as the heir of Thoreau—or better as the North American mahatma (Great Soul), meeting with presidents and heads of state, performing more eulogies for the Movement’s martyrs than he cared to remember, leading his generals in the siege of one southern town after another, flying to Africa, then to India, and five years before to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with a team of federal agents right on his heels, as they always were, closer even than his own heartbeat, he sometimes felt, though you had to wonder where they were and what the devil they were doing when that Harlem madwoman, Izola Curry, plunged a Japanese letter opener into his chest. Or when his Montgomery home was bombed, nearly killing his young wife and baby Yolanda.

  More tired, acclaimed, hated, gaoled, and hunted than any other Negro in history, but living this close to death was as inevitable as his being ordained a minister when he was eighteen. No matter how he looked at it, his calling meant that from the moment he donned his robe the laws governing his life were different from those of the vast majority of men; indeed, it was no longer his life to do with as he pleased. The world owned him long before he could own himself. As it is with candles, so it was with him: the more light he gave, the less there was of him. Moreover, since the First World War the Army had sniffed something dangerous in his family, some blood-gift for subversion more radical than anything Lenin dreamed up in Moscow; they had watched his father and grandfather closely, and interfered with their lives just as they did his, as devoted to shaming him, discrediting him, and driving him from public life as he was to bringing his ever expanding congregation a bit closer to the Kingdom of God on earth. People always thought he was older than his thirty-seven years. In point of fact, he felt old. Centuries old, and looked over fifty in some photographs: washed by all waters. Sometimes late at night, when he couldn’t sleep before yet another early morning flight, and his leather suitcase from Paris lay packed on the table in yet another unfamiliar hotel room, and the memories came washing over him in waves—the poor living like chattel, children dynamited in a church, Watts burning for six days, the death threats spewing through the telephone at his wife—on those nights he wept for the blood spilled by his enemies, for his own life’s lost options, for the outrageous fragility of what he hoped to achieve in a world smothering in materialism, in the propaganda of sensation, in scientific marvels unmoored from any sense of morality, and he wondered, there in the darkness before the dawn of what might be his last day on earth, if he’d ever been young at all.

  “Don’t go to Chicago,” his closest advisor said. “You can’t win there. You don’t know cities. Stay on your own turf.”

  The enemy was more elusive, said Hosea Williams and the city’s famed pastor, Joseph H. Jackson. Not crude country sheriffs like “Bull” Connor, who fell tail over tin cup before the world’s cameras into the bully-buffoon role they scripted for him, or heavy-browed bigots like George Wallace, whose reactions made outstanding copy for the cause. In Chicago, the villains were faceless institutions: banks, real estate agents, insurance companies, and landlords hardly better off, in some cases, than their ghetto tenants. But this town, he knew, was the Up North equivalent of Birmingham. If they could triumph here, establishing a beachhead for satyagraha (truth force) in a brutal city with a murder rate of slightly more than two people per day, here in balkanized ethnic enclaves that spawned Al Capone and hardened street gangs like the Cobras, the Vice Lords, and the Black Stone Rangers, here in a city where Stokely Carmichael’s poorly timed hut inevitable cry for Black Power during their Mississippi march to support one of the South’s wounded heroes, James Meredith, opened a Pandora’s box of rage and rang deeper into black hearts than any appeal for love (he knew betrayal, a stab in the hack when he saw it, hut told Carmichael, “I’ve been used before”), then they could conquer any citadel of inequality in the world.

  Yet no one thought he could win.

  A decade after his Montgomery victory, and spiraling successes throughout the South, nigh Hegelian in the mysterious way the Movement kept changing as he chased it, and changing him, pushing him higher and higher, beyond anything he’d dreamed possible in college, from local bus boycotts to unqualified calls for integration, and finally to grander dreams of global peace and equality—a decade after his finest triumphs for nonviolence, the press, and even people who’d joined hands with him singing “We Shall Overcome,” now saw his methods as outmoded, his insistence on loving one’s enemies as lunacy, his opposition to Black Power as outright betrayal. Oh, he needed a victory here. The Chicago crusade was costing as much as $10,000 some months. In the spirit of Martin Luther four centuries earlier, he taped his demands for the poor on the door of City Hall after marching three miles with five thousand men and women of goodwill from Soldier Field; but despite money spent and speeches delivered, the mayor’s office maneuvered, matching his call for jobs and open housing with promises and claims for progress that his critics dismissed as smoke and mirrors, mere Band-Aids aimed at making the problem (and him) go away. Never a day passed when he did not read that his stature was diminished, his day of leadership done, and he could not ignore his critics if he was, as he so often claimed, committed to the truth. Twelve times he’d been imprisoned in Alabama and Georgia jails, stabbed once, spat upon, and targeted for death so many times he could say, like the Apostle Paul, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord.” Yet for all his sojourning on the Jericho Road, his long journey through the valley of the shadow of death, his deeper, esoteric message about freedom had barely been heard. The gleaming keys he offered to the Kingdom made men and women who accepted his exoteric, surface-skimm
ing political speeches shrink back once they saw the long-sealed door he was asking them to enter, they could not pass through that portal and remain as they were: white and black, male and female, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor—these were ephemeral garments, he knew, and could no more clear that entrance than a camel through a needle’s eye. To gain the dizzying heights of the mountaintop the self’s baggage had to be abandoned in the valley. Little wonder, then, that so few grasped the goal he pointed to, or that on the Mississippi march and then in Chicago he was booed, and would have wept over this but instead thought back with thanksgiving (and was not all thought, as Heidegger pointed out, a form of thanksgiving?) to his professor at Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, who impressed upon him the importance of learning Henley’s poem “Invictus” (It matters not how strait the gate …). After his twelve years of sacrifice, the young people in the Mississippi crowd called him a traitor, an Uncle Tom (How charged with punishments the scroll …). In the cities, they sang “We Shall Over-Run.” (I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.)

  But somehow their rejection and resistance to his vision fit well into the way he then understood the world. He was a tightrope walker straddling two worlds. One of matter. One of spirit. Every social evil he could think of, and every “ontological fear,” as he was fond of saying lately, arose from that mysterious dichotomy inscribed at the heart of things: self and other, I and Thou, inner and outer, perceiver and perceived. It was a schism that, if not healed, would consume the entire world. Martyrdom held no appeal for him, but for every sorcerer named Jesus there was a Judas; for every bodhisattva called Gandhi, a Poona Brahmin named Nathuram Godse. The way to the crown was, now and forever, the cross. And it made no sense to carry the cross unless one was prepared to be crucified.

  He sensed how close he was to the end, this Christian boy from Atlanta, this product of three generations of black preachers, this theistic idealist, and sometimes he wished he was two people, or perhaps three. One to co-pastor each Sunday beside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Another to spend more time with his family, especially with his children; catch up on his reading (especially Tillich, Fromm, and Buber, who interested him more now than when he was in college); listen to opera, take his wife dancing, play basketball with the Southern Christian Leadership Council’s staff, leave his blue suits in the closet, dress more casually, and perhaps one day pursue a simple, ascetic life similar to that of Thich Nhat Hanh, the poet, Zen master, and chairman of the Vietnamese peace delegation whom he was currently promoting as a candidate for the Nobel. As he’d told his Montgomery congregation the day he resigned as pastor in 1959, he longed to escape “the strain of being known … I’ve been faced with the responsibility of trying to do as one man what five or six people ought to be doing … What I have been doing is giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat and meditate like I should—to come back. If the situation is not changed, I will be a physical and emotional wreck. I have to reorganize my personality and reorient my life. I have been too long in the crowd, too long in the forest …”