Dreamer Read online

  He drove the car thief to Sutherland’s place. The Virginian met them at the door, wearing a Confederate colonel’s cap. He invited them into his den, festooned with a rug imprinted with the Stars and Bars and a huge Rebel flag on one wall. There, Sutherland informed them he represented a covert southern group with deep pockets. They would pay $50,000 to anyone who killed the “big nigger” from Atlanta. Was he interested? Byers listened politely, then said he needed a while to think aver the offer. There was little chance he would accept, said the agent—Byers knew danger when he saw it—but in the underworld of Kauffmann, Byers’s brother-in-law, and Ray, it was widely known that an open contract had been issued for King’s head.

  It was, he knew, only a matter of time before someone collected that bounty. Pushing aside the papers on his desk (his aides told him he’d already generated close to 200,000 pages of documents), he found his pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out, searched his pockets for a matchbook, then lit the cigarette, extinguished the match with his thumb and forefinger, and sat back in his chair. How many days did he have left? Or should he be thinking now in terms of hours? Maybe minutes? What should a man do when at any moment he might be struck down?

  He knew.

  If he might not see tomorrow, then what he wished for most was to receive forgiveness from those he’d failed, beginning with his children. And his wife. Whatever failures there were in their marriage he blamed on himself, for no man could have asked for a better partner to share his life since 1952. She was pursuing her music career—as a singer of exceptional talent—at the New England Conservatory when they met in Boston. Yes, she’d heard of him before they met, and her impressions were not favorable. In Boston he was known for the brilliant sermons he delivered at local churches, but Coretta had reservations about the Baptist ministers she’d met. They were so … emotional, and she was hoping to align herself with a less fundamental, more liberal approach to religion. Added to that, the stuffiness of so many Baptist ministers bothered her. And wasn’t this M. L. King just a little too popular with the women in town? She’d heard he was brilliant, and had been accepted at Edinburgh University for graduate work (though Yale turned him down); he brought together other students at his place on St. Botolph Street for meetings of what they dubbed “The Dialectical Society,” at which they as well as their professors presented papers. She’d also heard he was playful, a good dancer and a party boy, a tease who dressed to the nines—a real ladies’ man, by most accounts, and Boston’s most eligible young black bachelor. It was with some reservation, then, that she surrendered to the matchmaking of her friend Mary Powell, who was married to the nephew of his former teacher, Benjamin Mays at Morehouse, and ate at the Western Lunch Box, an eatery specializing in down-home cooking, where black students—he among them—gathered to relax and talk. Mary warned him that Coretta might not be religious enough for his temperament, but at that point in his life he was frustrated by the women he was meeting. The woman he hoped to marry, he told Mary, must have four characteristics: character, intelligence, personality, and beauty. Mary, saying nothing, simply gave him Coretta’s phone number.

  When he picked her up in his green Chevy on the Huntington Avenue side of the conservatory—she with her coat buttoned to her throat and wearing a scarf, thinking of the struggles and sacrifices that had brought her from a culturally deprived background to Antioch and at last to her training here—her first thought when his car pulled up had been, Oh my God, look what a runt he is. (In point of fact, he was 166½ pounds that year, 66½ inches tall, and had a blood pressure of 134/64.) To her he at first seemed full of the slick, superficial language—the jive—of black men with only one thing on their minds. But no. As they spent time together that afternoon, in the cold rain of a January afternoon, she began to see deeper into his passion for Continental theology and his people’s deliverance. He was working that term, he said, in directed study with Professor DeWolf on a paper he would entitle “Karl Barth’s Conception of God,” and as he discussed his conclusions with her he grew more animated, explaining that Barth’s God was too removed from man, wholly Other, which he found unacceptable; but there was much in so-called crisis theology that, in his view, corrected liberal Protestantism’s sentimentalization of man. They sat in Sharaf’s Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, eating a cafeteria-style lunch. He put down his fork and leaned closer toward her, saying, “Maybe man is more a sinner than liberals are willing to admit.” In his paper’s conclusion he planned to question liberalisms naïve, ivory-tower belief in progress. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever-present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.” Talking on, waving his fork then, he watched her closely for her reaction, and was pleased by her attention and her bobbing her head in agreement when he said, “The word sin has to come back into our vocabulary. One hoary meaning of the word is ‘to miss the mark,’ as when an arrow goes astray. I like that. What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said.

  Yes, he was far more than she’d expected.

  And he could not keep his eyes off her. That day she was wearing bangs with a natural wave. That he liked. Indeed, he liked everything about her, even though he knew he would have to confront Daddy King head-on—a thing he dreaded more than anything else—when he brought this stunning woman, who was not one of Ebenezer’s own, home and introduced her as his fiancée. “You,” he told her, “are my Waterloo.”

  No man, he knew, would ever have a better companion by his side. When they were married in Alabama on June 18, 1953, the local Jim Crow laws prohibited them from spending their wedding night in a hotel. Instead they found lodging at a black funeral home. Yes, they had been through much together. As in most traditional, black southern Baptist households, she followed his lead, going so far as to let him tell her how she should dress or when she should fix herself up a little. If these were faults—failures in his understanding of equality—he regretted them, because in those early years of their marriage he felt liberated by her to at last be himself. He owed her that, an intimacy he’d never experienced before, one possible only through the strange alchemy of marriage, where two once separate and distinct histories blended to become a single destiny. True, he learned that this kind of love involved suffering, the extinction of the ego, but the trade-off, especially after the children were born, was his rebirth as a fully communal being, a man working in concert with another for the welfare of his family, which reinforced his passion for politics and social justice. In his later speeches, the ones assailing America’s crass and vulgar materialism, he was fond of saying, “The great problem facing modern man is that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.” What he didn’t say—and now wondered if he should have—was that through Coretta’s love he’d come to know that ecstatic freedom and the fullness of being-with.

  He wondered how badly she’d been hurt by the stories about his sexual affairs. There were women all over the country who claimed they’d known his affections. The rumor mill thrived on tales about the Kennedy brothers, or Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, according to a widely circulated and probably false report, unzipped his pants during a White House meeting and dropped his Texas-sized member on the conference table, asking, “Does Ho Chi Minh have one of these?” Because the public loved stones like these about the famous and powerful he was not surprised to hear them said about himself. But did any of his detractors stop once to admit that these stories about his wearing sunglasses and meeting women at a restaurant in Riverdale, and soliciting prostitutes, were all secondhand? Anything that came from the FBI—their saying, for example, that the wife of a California dentist was his mistress—was tainted, given their campaign to discredit him at any cost, first as a Communist, then later as a lecher. In the public’s eyes, however, accusation was equivalent to proof. His wife dismissed them. He could not. They forc
ed him to reconsider the vows he’d taken when he was nineteen. He was by no means an ethical relativist. Indeed, the very thought of that angered him. But maybe—just maybe—what he preached to others was impossible. Surely the commandments applied to him as a Christian minister. It would always be that way. The nonbeliever might not be judged or condemned or hurled into hell, but those who took spiritual vows—and them only—were subject to the narrow system, the “razors edge,” as some called it, of punishment and redemption. Consequence was reserved only for spiritual aspirants. These could not afford the slightest hint of moral failure, not a moment of weakness lest that be used against their cause. How did the old churchwomen put it? Dirt shows the quickest on the cleanest cotton. And if nothing could be found, they would have to live with misdeeds fabricated and passed along to reporters who received “information” on him from the government’s Crime Records Division. And in the horrible tape of a party in his hotel room, which his wife found at the SCLC’s office, mailed by a Bureau agent in November of 1964 from Miami, just thirty-four days before he was to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. He’d been at that raucous party, yes. People there told dirty jokes. A listener could conclude there was sexual activity in the room, but nothing—absolutely nothing—on the tape directly implicated him. His voice could barely be heard in the room. So Hoover ordered his lab to enhance his words a little, and when the supposedly damaging tape reached his wife it came with a letter that said: “Look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes … You could have been our greatest leader … But you are done … There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

  Many nights when he lay beside his wife, unable to sleep, he did want to put a gun to his head. To his congregation he’d said, “There is a Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll in us,” and not once did he exclude himself from the realm of sinners, though more than anything else in this world he wanted to be a good man.

  One thing—one poem—often steadied him during these nights of despair, lines composed four centuries earlier by his (and his father’s) namesake, Martin Luther:

  This life, therefore

  is not righteousness

  but growth in righteousness

  not health but healing

  not being but becoming

  not rest but exercise.

  We are not yet what we shall be

  but we are growing toward it.

  The process is not yet finished

  but it is going on,

  this is not the end

  but it is the road.

  All does not gleam in glory

  but all is being purified.

  Dexter cracked open his workroom door, holding a football. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I thought you were done working.”

  “I am, but I’m finished,” he said. “At least for now.”

  His son crossed the room, grabbing two of his fingers, and began pulling him outside toward the living room to play. He knew he would give his children this time, regardless of whether they kept him away from his work all evening. They were the Lord’s children, after all, and just as he was the channel for the gospel and not its source, he and his wife were merely the children’s temporary custodians. He knew he had let them down time and again. But Scripture said if a man tried—and kept trying—to serve the good, the true, and the beautiful, Providence would not turn its back. No man, he knew, was given burdens too great for him to carry; indeed, the point was to pass beyond the vanity that he, not God, bore that burden, and realize, even if he had to learn it the hard way and at almost a fatal price, that the challenge of the spiritual was simply this: to be good, truly moral, and in control of oneself for this moment only, because what other moment in time could a man be held responsible for?

  11

  “We were pulling for you from the start,” said Groat. He sat at the kitchen table, which he and Withersby had covered with weathered, string-tied portfolios crammed with reams of green-tinted paper. It was the first time I’d seen Groat up close and in strong light. A fat, froggish man, he lifted the soft drink I gave him and drained it in one long swallow. His skin had the texture of rice paper. His sweat smelled oily. Clearly, he did not meet the weight standard set for federal agents, which meant either he or his physician falsified his yearly medical examinations in order to save his job. He talked on for a while in his thick-tongued voice about his arthritis, his recurring knee problems, reciting his weaknesses and defects the way people sometimes do to disarm you, as if to say they know full well their deficiencies and need to mention them before you take notice and think poorly of them. On the other hand, I thought, this might be nothing more than a ploy to shape our opinions of him before we’d properly had time to pass judgment.

  “Back in Washington,” he said, giving his brittle, snaplike smile, “there’s a lot of … concern … about what’s happening to Dr. King.” Groat lifted a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, lit one, blew smoke toward the ceiling, then flicked the ash into his soda can. “His friends, some of his closest aides, are damned worried. Did you two know that?”

  “No,” I said. “Worried about what?”

  “Despair, fits of depression.” Groat spread open one of his portfolios, then read from his pages like a doctor delivering a diagnosis, his face knotted around the eyes. “According to reports I’ve got here, he’s got everyone worried. Most of the time he’s morose, distracted. Can’t sleep at night, so he stays up making his staff listen to his sermons over and over again. I figure he’s worn out Andrew Young by now, and earlier this month when he took a vacation—about the first he’s had in years—he damned near scared Ralph Abernathy to death after he got out of bed in his pajamas and started singing “Rock of Ages” on his hotel balcony. More people on Atlanta’s SCLC staff than I care to mention can’t see the logic behind his plan to flood Washington with the poor; he’s known to walk out of those meetings when things don’t go his way. See, I think it’s the strain. All the riots and death in the cities last year. And the years before that. He blames himself for them. And if he doesn’t, if he denies that there’s blood on his hands, his critics lay the corpses right on his doorstep, telling him the day of nonviolence is done, that it was just a foolish dream anyway. Then you got to figure how he’s feeling, what with Adam Clayton Powell calling him Martin Loser King, H. Rap Brown taking over SNCC, donations to the SCLC dropping, and one of his own folks, James Bevel, saying whites are the most savage, bestial, murderous, and corrupt people on earth ’cause at bottom they’re mentally ill. Look at all he’s got stacked against him. Every civil rights leader—Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Jackie Robinson, Ralph Bunche, and even King’s own father at first—says his stand against Vietnam is the most reckless thing he’s ever done, a move that’ll splinter the Movement right down the middle, seeing how the military’s been at the forefront of integration, and Johnson’s committed himself to the Great Society’s war on poverty. His former allies feel betrayed. His enemies constantly tell him he’s failed. That’s right, he hasn’t had a civil rights victory in two years. And it’s showing. Hairline cracks here and there, ones he can’t hide. He told Jesse Jackson he ought to go on one of those Gandhi-like fasts unto death to make the rioters in the cities stop and the bickering factions among black activists come together. You watch him out in public, you’ll see how his eyes keep moving, looking for someone about to attack him. That’s called paranoia, isn’t it? When he’s talking, he balls his right fist and keeps rubbing his fingers with his thumb. His speeches sound morbid. They’re all about dying. Hell, you listen close enough, they sound like they’re about a death wish. Not long ago he sent his wife a bouquet of plastic flowers. Red carnations. And when she asked him why, he told her, ‘I wanted to give you something you could always keep.’ Does that sound like a man who has given up or what? Just between you and me, one of his friends has been urging him to see a psychiatrist …”

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nbsp; Withersby rubbed his nose, looking up from his notepad. “He shot that idea down. I think he’s suspicious of psychoanalysis.”

  “Comes from his college days,” Groat agreed. “He’s probably worried some shrink’ll go right to those two times he tried to commit suicide when he was a kid.”

  “Yes, but look at Malcolm Little. He was better on that score.” Withersby glanced from Groat to me, then to Smith. “During the last year of his life, before those Muslims shot him onstage at the Audubon Ballroom, he was looking into analysis to understand how for seven years he could have preached that doctrine of Yacub, the black scientist, being the inventor of the white race. He told photographer Gordon Parks he’d been mad and sick earlier. Actually, what he said—I’ve got the report right here—was, ‘I was a zombie—like all the rest of them. I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march.‘”

  Groat rocked his head. “I read that report. It’s sad it took so long for him to come to his senses. But, you know, I think Little made a lot of sense. I’m all for integration, but you ought to see some of the slime me’n Vincent spend our time investigating, scumbags like Carlo Gambino, the Gallo brothers, and Joe Columbo. I mean, do colored folks really want to integrate with them?”

  “Why,” Smith asked, “are you telling us this?”

  “Because we think you can help King before it’s too late. As you can tell, he won’t—or can’t—slow down. Not even for a day. You know, it’s funny how some men try to kill themselves. Not all of them take pills or stick a shotgun in their mouths. Some I’ve seen force policemen to do it for them. Others, the workaholics, do it slow. They do it by taking on tasks they know they can’t finish, projects they know will put them six feet under. I think that’s what we’ve got here. Damn near every hand is turned against this man. And what does he do? Plan night and day to bring all the poor together in April to disrupt and shut down the federal government, despite his pal Rustin telling him there’s no way he’s gonna get Irishmen, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Chicanos, and Negroes to put aside their differences and form an alliance. He brought some of their leaders together a few weeks ago, and what they said was, ‘Our problems are different from yours.’ A sane man might have second thoughts, he might wonder if he’s over-reaching himself, especially since his antiwar work’s depleted most of his funds. He’d probably wonder, I’m saying, if this last, greatest dream of his—this jump from race to class, from local crises to a national one—might turn into a nightmare when he brings all those poor people to Washington to demonstrate and fill up the hospitals and jails. He’d ask himself, What if there’s violence? How do we feed them? Where will they sleep? Or go to the toilet? Now me, I believe in what he used to stand for. I’m a Democrat, I voted for Kennedy. King’s done some good work, but there’s a problem. It’s the company he keeps. Ex-Communists and fellow travelers. In Washington they figure if he’s not red, he’s awfully doggone pink. Maybe a security risk. And dammit, I think they’re right. He’s calling for an Economic Bill of Rights, the redistribution of wealth, and a guaranteed income. Listen to this note King made to himself in fifty-one. ‘It is a well-known fact that no social institution can survive when it has outlived its usefulness. This capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.’ Now, that sure as hell sounds to me like what I hear coming from behind the Iron Curtain. What do you think?”