Dreamer Read online

  Because Mama Pearl, once an employee of Fanny’s Restaurant in Evanston, occasionally attended services with friends at Calvary AME, Amy knew something of the town’s older black residents, mostly craftsmen—plumbers and electricians—transplanted from the South during World War II, whole families that migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from the Mississippi Delta, from Tennessee and Arkansas and western Kentucky in the greatest mass movement of humanity in American history. They were, in their own way, initially outcasts. Their church, started in Philadelphia in 1787 after the Great Awakening by Richard Allen, was equidistant from the ivied halls and manicured lawns of Northwestern University and the all-black Center Hospital, situated on the canal dividing Evanston from lily-white Skokie. According to Amy’s mother, nearly half the church’s teenagers came into the world at Center Hospital, and each could claim a single, courageous black woman, Dr. Jennifer Hale, as the person who saw them before their own mothers and spanked wind into their lungs. Amy said that decades earlier when Hale, a beautiful, buff-colored young doctor with the gentility one associates with Creoles, arrived in Evanston, she discovered that black patients were turned away from the doors of Evanston’s white hospital farther north near Wilmette, regardless of how sick they might be. Segregation forced Hale to ferry her patients to hospitals on Chicago’s South Side, and too many died on the way for her to rest with this disastrous arrangement. She was outraged. Her patients, while pariahs to the white population, worked in white homes and saved to send their children to college—that, after forming their own neighborhood YMCA and colored Boy and Girl Scout chapters; some held down three jobs a week, always struggling and sacrificing to free their sons and daughters from the curse of color that hung over their own lives. The idea of public assistance was anathema to many of them, such a blow to their southern pride that they never considered for a moment turning outside their own families—or extended families—for help. They treated all the black children at Calvary AME as their own, scolding them and telling their parents if in public they behaved in ways that reflected badly on the struggling community as a whole.

  By mobilizing blacks and whites of conscience, Hale became one of the principal players in first envisioning, then coaxing into being, Center Hospital; and by doing this, Amy said, she saved countless black lives as well as created jobs for other doctors, nurses, and dentists of color. The hospital, though never as large or as well-funded as its white counterpart, was nevertheless something of a beacon of pride for local blacks in the 1950s, and Dr. Hale justly held a place of high esteem in Evanston. Her life was her work. She never married, but she delivered countless baby boomers after the war—her “children,” she called them—and many were pleasantly shocked to realize that Hale recognized them by name twenty years later as she traveled from one Evanston home to another, making house calls.

  Among her elderly patients, those belonging to the first black wave that migrated to Evanston, was a congenial black contractor named Robert Jackson whose company won the contract for building Calvary AME, and who, even after the white hospital began accepting Negro patients, remained loyal to Center and allowed his relations to take him nowhere else. They belonged to the same era, Dr. Hale and contractor Jackson—a breed of black men and women, like King’s parents and Amy’s great-grandfather, so toughened by prejudice, by the rule of having to do twice as much as whites to get half as far, that they regarded no problem as insurmountable. With little formal education, he’d come north from a farm near Abbeville in South Carolina during the 1920s, bringing nothing more with him than a strong back, a quick wit, and a burning need to succeed against staggering odds; he checked out Chicago, then moved to Evanston, where Negroes found leftovers from the tables of well-to-do whites somewhat larger than the scraps tossed to blacks in the city. No question, there was a residue of apartheid here. Black women, when cleaning some white homes, were likely to find literature from the John Birch Society on the living room coffee tables. But where others saw only racial restrictions and what they couldn’t do, Jackson, a tall, dark-fired man who was most certainly a follower of Booker T. Washington, believed in his bones that opportunities had to be made by Negroes if they were to happen at all. Was the hospital segregated? Did Northwestern’s sororities exclude blacks in their charters? Were white milk companies denying service to colored folks who settled in Evanston after their long sojourn from Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama? Always a man who preferred work and getting his hands dirty to complaining, building to bellyaching, Bob Jackson responded to racism by founding the Jackson Dairy Company. Every morning before daybreak he delivered on black doorsteps milk in pint bottles of thick, sturdy glass that bore his name on the front and on the back the reminder This bottle not sold … Wash and Return. He labored to put his business in the black (no pun intended, Amy said), came up with a catchy jingle for it, and did well enough, thank you, until the Depression brought it abruptly to an end, but not by any means his restlessness, ambition, and sense of industry.

  Construction work came next, mainly as a way to make ends meet, though Bob Jackson was never satisfied, according to what Amy’d learned from her grandmother, working for other people. He stayed on the crew long enough to learn the ropes, then ventured out on his own again, this time unveiling yet another dream that had him up pacing the floor at night and pulling his hair, the little he had in his late fifties. By name, the dream was the Jackson Construction Company. And his first act as an entrepreneur was to offer jobs to the sons of his brothers down South. The elder Jackson’s new business thrived for decades, drawing on a pool of black subcontractors who helped him raise churches, apartment complexes, and residences—places for his people to live and worship their god—all over the North Shore, including the two-story, many-roomed building he built for himself in the heart of the black community on Simpson Street, with rental spaces on the first floor for a beauty parlor and a barbershop.

  The product of his labor made Bob Jackson a proud man well enough off to buy a bench for his family at Calvary AME, where his nieces sang in the choir; for despite obstacles and a hundred white men who’d stood in his way (and were now deservedly long forgotten, with no monuments on the landscape to mark their existence), he could boast that his blood built this town. With many black Evanstonians he shared the belief that life was getting better, that their offerings to the Lord had been blessed a hundredfold since they left the South, and with legal segregation struck down he counseled his platoon of grand-nephews and -nieces (spared the devastating discrimination he’d known) that if they were genuinely concerned about the economic inequities they saw in the world, “The best thing you children can do for the poor is not be one of them.” On the surface it sounded harsh, but his relations knew their great-uncle meant something else, that by fulfilling his duties as a householder, by creating wealth, he always had deep pockets into which their fathers and mothers could reach for funds when they needed the down payment on a home, or extra cash to cover their bills when they were between jobs. Bob Jackson paid his grand-nieces and -nephews four dollars for every A they received at Noyes Elementary School and Sidles Junior High, three dollars for every B (nothing for a C), and established a trust fund they could draw upon for college tuition because more than anything else he wanted them to have the one thing he lacked in 1966 that kept him from becoming a millionaire. “Get an education,” he told them. “Don’t you put anything ahead of that.”

  Smith was scrunched down in the backseat of the Chevelle, allowing Amy to apply a Band-Aid to exactly the spot on his forehead where the minister was struck by a brick. “That’s who’s coming to this church tonight?” He was still high, sailing on heroin. His voice trembled. “People like them?”

  “Probably,” Amy said. “People like Mr. Jackson’s kin, Dr. Hale, and Leroy Young. He rewired the bookstore, Great Expectations, over near the university. They don’t make headlines. They’re just proud, quietly pious, good people. Like the folks in Doc’s community in Atlanta.” She gazed ou
t the window at palatial homes perched far back from the road on Ridge Avenue. “They’re the ones who want to honor Doc. I’m pretty sure Elijah Muhammad would bomb here.”

  “You didn’t tell me any of this before I said I’d do it.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah, it matters. Everything here seems so … finished. God loves these Negroes. What do I say to them?”

  “Nothing!” I whirled round in my seat, grabbed his tie, and pulled his head toward me. “You don’t say a blessed thing, Chaym, you hear me? That’s not what we’re here for.” I almost lost control of the steering wheel, so I let his tie go, and took a deep breath to steady myself. “Besides, I don’t think you’re ready. Just accept the goddamn prize for Doc and get down off the pulpit as soon as you can. Tell the pastor you’re tired. Tell him you’ve got laryngitis. Tell him anything, but wrap this up as fast as you can. If you don’t, you’ll ruin everything. Got that?”

  “You don’t think I’m good enough to give a speech here?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But it’s what you meant,” he grumbled. “Shit, as long as he’s alive, I guess I’ll always be nothing.”

  Amy cleared her throat to end the conversation. “Matthew, look in the rearview mirror.”

  “Why?”

  “Just look, will you?”

  I cranked down my window and in the mirror affixed to the door saw a plain green Plymouth about five car-lengths behind us.

  “Those Wise Guys,” said Smith, “have been baby-sittin’ us since we left Doc’s apartment. I recognize the plates. That’s a government car …”

  Amy pressed her nose against the back window. “Why’re they following us?”

  “I’ll give you three guesses,” said Smith, “and the first two don’t count. You gonna call this off?”

  “No.” I slowed the car to a crawl. “I think I can circle around the block and lose them.”

  Amy shook my shoulder. “Are you kiddin’? The church is straight ahead and—oh no, will you—will you look at that?”

  The entire block from Dodge Avenue to Darrow was cordoned off. Vans from local radio and television stations were parked alongside the church, closed in by a crowd I estimated to be at five or six hundred. A traffic cop, young, still wearing his sunglasses though it was twilight, waved vehicles west up Emerson Street toward Skokie. I slowed the Chevelle even more, rolled down my window, told the cop I was bringing the minister for tonight’s service, then turned right toward the church when he let me through. The green Plymouth eased toward the curb at the end of the block. Sunlight was fading fast. I couldn’t clearly see the faces of the men following us, and then there was no time to think about them because Calvary AME’s pastor, Rev. Jacob Coleman, a tidy-looking, tea-colored man with a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole who’d been waiting inside the door, rushed outside. He took Smith by the arm, explaining that his ushers would provide security, and led us through people trying to touch or detain the man they thought was King to the rear of the church.

  Inside a tiny kitchen behind the main room, Smith began to unravel. I should have seen it coming. I should have known. When the magnitude of what the minister asked us to do finally dawned on him, when he was at last standing at the door of his first real performance as a double, Smith collapsed heavily onto a wooden folding chair and began mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. His breathing was ragged, asthmatic. Suddenly he began hiccuping uncontrollably, almost strangling, and looked helplessly toward Amy. I knew she was thinking the same as me. It was over. He was ready for riding in decoy cars, for drawing fire away from King, but not for standing before an audience of over five hundred of the genuinely faithful … He was going to crash and burn, as he’d always done in the Citivas Dei. Blow this operation wide open. Fall on his face and embarrass us all. Or worse, pass out right there in the kitchen in front of Calvary AME’s ushers and clergy.

  “Is something wrong?” Rev. Coleman asked.

  Amy eased herself between the pastor and Smith. “Give us a few minutes alone, okay? He just needs to compose himself before he gets his cue.”

  Reluctantly Rev. Coleman cleared the kitchen, leaving Amy and Smith to themselves.

  I left through a side door and joined the congregation, taking a spot to the right of the pulpit. I scanned the crowd, my eyes tracking packed wooden pews in the northeast corner to the laity filling the seats and aisles in front of me, men in their best (and only) dark suits brought out from the back of their closets every Sunday or for occasions such as this, their brogans shined and buffed the night before, cooling themselves with fans provided on the back of each bench, their wives, bearing names such as Adella, Inell, and Luberta, sitting quietly beside them in light cotton dresses, some wearing gloves despite the heat of bodies packed so close together on the benches, perspiration just beginning to bead on their foreheads, dampening at the root oil-heavy hairdos subjected earlier in the day to the straightening comb; I picked out Robert Jackson, a dignified, immaculately dressed, balding Negro sitting on the bench he bought at Calvary, then to his right another old man in a rimpled K-Mart suit, holding a wide-brimmed hat on his lap. My eyes moved up, up above them, to a triptych of stained-glass windows on the western wall, one depicting an alb-clad Jesus standing before Herod’s jeering soldiers in the praetorium, another showing Jesus during his lonely vigil of fasting in the desert, the large middle painting portraying a mob hanging him from the cross, and though I knew I was supposed to be watching the crowd, scanning the room every few seconds, my eyes never resting anywhere for long because who knew where an assassin might appear, the feeling that always flooded through me when I entered Negro churches came over me again—the sense, right or wrong, that for the briefest of moments I was safe from the ravages, the irreality, the racial stupidities of the world outside Calvary’s doors, that no harm could befall anyone here where so much of value was preserved, meaning made manifest in the minutest details by black people who came to this place, sacred and set off from the chaos of the streets outside, to find husbands and wives, to baptize their children, and to bury their dead before gathering at the home of the deceased, sharing memories of her with the survivors, and being fed by her friends and neighbors who filled the kitchen table with food as a reminder that the bereaved must take nourishment, no matter if they were hungry or not, and walk on, and know that death was not final, because Jesus conquered that once and for all, so yes, eat and be joyful even in mourning because no Christian should forget the good news of the gospel, and no believer in Him ever feel alone or have cause for despair. From my childhood came a verse, Nevermore thou needest seek Me / I am with thee everywhere: / Raise the stone and thou shalt find Me / Cleave the wood and I am there. This was what Calvary’s congregation believed. What I had been taught from the time I could walk. Religion (Latin religare, “to bind,” or bring together those things broken, torn asunder). But was all this, I wondered, an illusion? Badly I wanted to believe, as they did. Behind me I heard twenty teenage girls in white blouses and black skirts blending their voices in the opening hymn, “Amazing Grace,” wringing that song out so thoroughly it outstripped anything on WVON’s “Top Forty.” An old woman who favored Helen Martin about the face stroked the keys of an ancient piano, and while I did not know if her faith was ill-founded, I did know it was here—and only here, in the Negro church, for the last hundred years—that black people pooled their money in order to send the congregation’s best students on to train at schools like Morehouse and Fisk; here that teachers selflessly used their weekends and nights to tutor children and conduct Sunday-school classes that, beginning with the Bible, branched out forward and back in the better seminars to examine the preconditions for Christianity and all the intellectual and scientific traditions it had influenced from Tertullian to quantum physics; here that a young Romare Bearden encountered the cornucopia of styles and forms—in spirituals, hymns, prayers, and sermons—that opened him to the epic dialogue that
was art; and here, finally, that the civil rights movement was nurtured and sustained, prayer and racial politics inseparably melded by clergy, stewards, and trustees who, if they knew nothing else, understood that they served their people best by reminding them again and again that their political and racial struggles were but the backdrop against which a far greater spiritual odyssey was unfolding, and that no worldly triumph deserved hallelujahs if in their secular victories they somehow lost their souls.

  At Calvary’s crowded entrance I saw the Wise Guys.

  There were two of them, one a hairless, pursy, middle-aged little man in horn-rimmed glasses, slow-moving as a turtle, his belly bubbling over his belt. The other was Titian-haired, thin, in his twenties, his profile made birdlike by a hawkbill nose, carrying a notepad he scribbled on in shorthand, never looking down at the page. They looked tired; they kept shifting their weight from one leg to the other, as if maybe their feet hurt. In another context they might have been Mormons working a neighborhood, tramping from door to door. These were the ones who followed us from the West Side, whom I’d seen on the road in rural Illinois, and who now no doubt were taking down names. They looked intensely interested when the audience rose to its feet and erupted into clapping and cheers.

  Amy walked in behind King—it most certainly was King, not Chaym Smith—from the kitchen to a row of seats on the stage. I had no idea how the minister had gotten here at the last minute, but I muttered thanks to the Almighty, for the prayer I’d made had come to pass, and I released my breath, which I felt I’d been holding for hours.

  And then the audience settled down. Whether the minister knew it or not, his physical presence, while not imposing, brought a hush like soft background music, or as if someone cracked a window in a crowded, smoke-filled room. I felt something in him sorely lacking in myself—grace or a spiritual wealth so great he could give of himself endlessly, and always there was twelve basketfuls left over, as one might dip a cup into the sea and never see it emptied. He was an old soul. Centuries old. Not putting on a show, he stopped all conversation and commanded respect; not justifying himself, he was distinguished; not boasting, he was instantly acknowledged. Standing beside Rev. Coleman at the forest of black microphones on the pulpit, with flashbulbs exploding like fireworks in the hands of the Associated Press and British newsmen who rushed to the front of the church, he was august, hugely present, relaxed, munificent, established in mercy, but at his center I felt a cemetery—a coolness and crypt—in which all regard for himself and his safety lay buried. Something in him was dead, extinguished so long ago during the Montgomery boycott when he was hardly more than a boy that it no longer even existed in memory In some way that I could not coax into clarity, his very presence challenged me and commented, without his having yet said a word, on my own staggering shortcomings as a man, a Negro, a Christian. The level he was living on did that. No newspaper article or television interview touched what I felt that evening. To engage him at all, this preacher who dared to say, “There will be no permanent end to the race problem until oppressed men develop the capacity to love their enemies,” who quoted Epictetus, Keats, Emerson, and Dunbar as if they were his first cousins—to meet him face-to-face, I realized, forced a man to kick up his own thoughts and feelings a notch or two, as you might when going one-on-one with the finest athletes on a playing field, so that even mediocre men like me rose momentarily to finer planes of performance.