Dreamer Page 2

  And a third person to direct the Chicago campaign from the foul-smelling flat the SCLC and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations leased at 1550 South Hamlin Street in the heart of “Slumdale.” From a security standpoint its location was a nightmare. The neighborhood was notorious for crime. Saturday-night shootings and streetwalkers. Establishing a perimeter was impossible. Any rooftop across the street would tempt a rifleman. Noises from downstairs, loud, braying conversations from other apartments, could not be kept out. When a sanitation truck rolled by, the floor shuddered and pictures fell off the wall. Even so, he insisted that not a blessed thing in this soulless place be changed. They had come to Chicago to dramatize the fact that for $90 per month slumlords gave poor blacks—who on the average earned $4,700 yearly—the opportunity to dwell, some families packed ten to a flat, in wretched dumps of such advanced rot and decay that each crumbling unpainted wall, each untiled floor, each brokendown radiator, each crisp roach egg in the cabinets, each dishrag curtain on the windows, and each rusted faucet reinforced the free-floating despair that if you lived here, where every particle of your physical surroundings induced shame and was one step up from trash, was a throwaway, was substandard, then the country must regard you as a throwaway too.

  The hallway leading to his third-floor rooms was black-dark. The stairs trembled under his feet. He couldn’t lock the front door, so winos were free to piss in the entryway. In other words, the place where he’d brought his family was a urinal. And he, even he, hated the climb up the rickety steps to the top of the stairs. High above his door a single tungsten bulb buzzed in a halo of swirling dust motes the last few seconds before its filament flimmered out. Inside, their four rooms—hollow rinds filled with secondhand furniture—were arranged boxcar style (one for sitting, two for sleeping, and a miserable little kitchen) and were blisteringly hot and claustrophobic in the summer of 1966, even when his wife threw open the windows, for whatever breezes came through the rooms earned as well petroleum fumes and loud conversations and the roar of traffic from the streets below. Was this worth ninety dollars a month? Moreover, was proving his point by living here worth the toll he saw it taking on his family? The drain, the darkening of their spirits. “There’s nothing green in sight,” Coretta said, and for a moment he’d felt panicky, afraid, wondering if his work for his people, which he knew would kill him (“This is what is going to happen to me,” he’d told her as they sat solemnly watching the news of John Kennedy’s murder)—wondering if it would destroy his beautiful wife and four children as well.

  In the last forty-eight hours, he’d survived a meeting with Richard Daley, from whom he’d won a few precious concessions (sprinklers attached to fire hydrants, swimming pool shipped to the West Side) that might defuse the potential for more rioting; then he’d gathered with gang members to sway them to the side of nonviolence, meetings so torn by conflict and shouting and hatred of the police that he had to make himself appear to be the person at fault in order to calm the others down. Having come through these crises, and with more to face, the man from whom the world expected everything, who sometimes went for days on four hours of sleep and rested fully only when he checked into a hospital, tried for a moment to nap, to step back from the severe discipline that black manhood called for in the twentieth century for just one precious moment in the sweltering heat of his Lawndale flat.

  1

  I knocked on his open bedroom door. “Doc?”

  Rolling over, he crushed the lumpy pillow against his chest but kept his eyes closed, probably hoping whoever had come would go away, at least for a few moments more. Except for one other security person, we were alone in the apartment. His wife and children were staying at the home of Mahalia Jackson until the shooting died down. Later he would tell me he’d been dreaming of the sunset at Land’s End, that breathtaking stretch of beach on Cape Comorin in the Hindu state of Kerala, which struck him as the closest thing to paradise when he and Coretta traveled to India: he dreamed an ancient village of brown-skinned people (Africa was in their ancestry) who knew their lord Vishnu by a thousand names, for He was imminent in the sky and sand, wood and stone, masquerading as Many. He’d come to India not as celebrated civil rights leader but as a pilgrim. To learn. And though the promise of that pilgrimage was cut short when he plunged into the ongoing crisis back home, he had indeed learned much. Against the glorious sunset of Kerala, with the softest whisper of song carried on the wind from temples close by, Ahimsa paramo dharma, his wife took his hand and turned him to see the moon swell up from the sea, and in that evanescent instant, at the place where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal flowed together, he experienced an ineffable peace, and had never felt so free, and …

  “Doc, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said into the darkness. Though the lamps were off, burning fires outside the window pintoed his bedroom wall. “There’s someone here to see you. I think you’d better take a look at him.”

  When he looked toward the door, toward me, I knew what he saw: a twenty-four-year-old with the large, penetrating “frog eyes” of his friend James Baldwin behind a pair of granny glasses, dehydrating and dripping sweat in brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt weighted down by a battery of pencils and pens. I stepped into the room and walked directly to the window, looking down before I shut it on streets turned into combat zones as treacherous as any that year in Tay Ninh or Phnom Penh. The fuse: black kids cranking on fire hydrants. The flame: police trying to stop them. The consequence: a crowd that poured bricks and whiskey bottles and then ricocheting bullets from balconies and rooftops. It was not a night, July 17, to be out in bedlam unless you had to be. Firefighters dousing blazes set by roving street gangs had to be out there. Marksmen hunkered down behind their squad cars, praying that Governor Kerner would order, as promised, four thousand National Guardsmen into the city, had to be there—and so in a few short hours did the man whose sleep I had interrupted.

  At the window, I could see two men shoot out the streetlight at the intersection of Sixteenth Street and South Hamlin. Their first shots missed the target; then at last one struck, plunging the corner into darkness. A sound of shattering glass came from the grocery store on Sixteenth Street. The pistol fire had been so close, just below the window, it changed air pressure inside the building, tightening my inner ear. Roving gangs were setting cars on fire. Light from the interiors of torched cars threw shadows like strokes of tar across the bedroom’s furnishings. Below the window figures darted furtively through the darkness, their colors and clans indistinguishable, slaying—or trying to slay—one another. I no longer knew on which side of this slaying I belonged. Or if there was any victory, pleasure, or Promised Land that could justify the killing and destruction of the past three nights.

  I looked at the watch on my wrist. The luminous numerals read 8:15, but it felt more like midnight in the soul.

  “Who is it?” The minister rubbed his eyes. “Is he here for the Agenda Committee meeting? Tell him I’ll be ready in just a minute—”

  “No, sir. He’s outside in the hallway now. Reverend, I think you need to take a look at this.”

  After swinging his feet to the floor, he sat hunched forward, both elbows on his knees, waiting for his head to clear. I noticed he wore no cross around his neck. Nor did he need one. With his shirt open, there in the bedroom’s heat, I could see the scar tissue shaped like a rood—a permanent one—over his heart, carved into his flesh by physician Aubre D. Maynard when he removed Izola Curry’s letter opener from his chest in Harlem Hospital. I knew he was tired, and I did not rush him. His staff had been working off-the-clock since the West Side went ballistic. He hadn’t slept in two days. Neither had I. All this night I’d drifted in and out of nausea, finding a clear space where I briefly felt fine, then as I heard the gunfire again, sirens, the sickness returned in spasms of dizziness, leaving me weak and overheated, then chilled.

  He reached toward his nightstand for the wristwatch he’d left on top of a
stack of books—The Writings of Saint Paul, Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy, Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ—alongside the sermon he was preparing for the coming Sunday. Typically, his sermons took two-thirds of a day to compose. In them his conclusions were never merely closures but always seemed to be fresh starting points. The best were classically formal, intentionally Pauline, cautious at the beginning like the first hesitant steps up a steep flight of stairs, then each carefully chosen refrain pushed it higher, faster, with mounting intensity, toward a crescendo that fused antique form and African rhythms, Old Testament imagery and America’s most cherished democratic ideals—principles dating back to the Magna Carta—into a shimmering creation, a synthesis so beautiful in the way his words alchemized the air in churches and cathedrals it could convert the wolf of Gubbio. He was, I realized again, a philosopher, which was something easy to forget (even for him) in a breathless year that began with the January murder of student Sammy Younge in Alabama, seventeen-year-old Jerome Huey beaten to death in Cicero in May, Fred Hubbard shot in April, Ben Chester White (Mississippi) and Clarence Triggs (Louisiana) killed by the Klan in June and July, the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond in February because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, Kwame Nkrumah deposed as Ghana’s leader the same month, then the slaughter of eight Chicago student nurses by a madman named Richard Speck. Not until I saw the books by his bed did I recall that in a less tumultuous time he taught Greek thought to a class of Morehouse students, among them Julian Bond, who testified that King, a freshly minted Ph.D., often looked up from his notes, closed his copy of Plato’s collected dialogues, and brought whole cloth out of his head passages from Socrates’ apology, emphasizing the seventy-one-year-old sage’s reply to his executioners, “I would never submit wrongly to any authority through fear of death, but would refuse even at the cost of my life.”

  After turning his watch-stem a few times, he squinted up at me, searching his mind for my name. I could tell he remembered me only as one of his organization’s many, nameless volunteers.

  “I know I’ve seen you, urn—”

  “Matthew, sir. Matthew Bishop.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” he said.

  Although he took great care to put everyone on his staff at ease, I’d always felt awkward and off-balance on the few occasions I’d been in his presence; I’d never seemed able to say the right things or find a way to stand or sit that didn’t betray how disbelieving I was that he was talking to someone who had as little consequence in this world (or the next) as I did. As he pulled on his shoes, I guessed straightaway what he was thinking: I was not making sense, nor was I much to look at. I knew I left no lasting impression on people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name. I had no outstanding features, no “best side,” as they say, to hold in profile. During SCLC meetings, a demonstration, rally, or march, I blended easily into the background, as bland and undistinguished as a piece of furniture, so anonymous most people forgot I was there. I was no taller than the minister himself, but much thinner: a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself. I kept my hair neatly trimmed, wore respectable shoes, and always had a book or magazine nearby to flip open when I found myself alone, which, as it turned out, was most of the time, even when I was in a crowd. I was nobody. A man reminded of his mediocrity—and perishability—nearly every moment of the day. A nothing. Merely a face in the undifferentiated mass of Movement people who dutifully did what our leaders asked, feeling sometimes like a cog in a vast machine—I did feel that way often: replaceable like the placards we made for a march, or the flyers we plastered all over the city, only to paper over them with new pages a week later.

  Then why did I join? My mother revered Dr. King. And I did too. Compared with the minister and his family, who were Georgia brahmins, the closest thing black America had to a First Family, we were at best among the “little people,” like the inconspicuous disciple Andrew, destined to run their errands and man their ditto machines on the margins of history. Nevertheless, my mother (to me) was regal, aristocratic by virtue of her actions: a sister to Mother Pollard who, when stopped by reporters during the Montgomery boycott, said, “My feets is tired but my soul is rested.” It was that woman and my mother King had in mind when in his 1955 speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church he said, “When the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning into the veins of civilization.’” That was true of him, of course. History knew nothing of Ellesteen Bishop. Since her death it was as if she’d never lived, and now only existed in memory, in me during those times when I thought of her, which were less and less each year, and when I ceased to be, it seemed to me, all vestiges of her would vanish as well. (Often I tried to reconstruct her face, and found I could not remember, say, her ears. How could I forget my own mother’s ears?) In her mind, the minister was a saint. She’d kept his portrait right beside photos of Jesus and John Fitzgerald Kennedy over her bed. More than anything I wanted to help the Movement that had meant so much to her, to do something for him, since I was, as I said, a man of no consequence at all.

  “It’s good to see young people like yourself helping out,” the minister said. “How old did you say you were?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Relax, there’s no need to be nervous. Tell me, what exactly do you do around here?”

  “Whatever needs doing. Sometimes it’s filing,” I said. “Other times it’s taking notes at meetings and getting out flyers. For the last week I’ve been chauffeuring your wife to speeches on the North Side and sticking around evenings to help Amy watch the apartment. It gives me a chance to catch up on my studies.”

  “You’re in school, then?”

  “I was … until last year. I left when my mother passed.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, nodding. “And your father—”

  “I never knew him.”

  He glanced away, clearing his throat. “What were you working on? In school, I mean.”

  “Philosophy.”

  All at once his eyes brightened, as if I’d called the name of an old friend. “When there’s time,” he said, “you should let me look over some of your papers. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to put everything aside and freely discuss ideas. Who were you reading?”

  “I left off with Nietzsche.”

  From the distaste on his face, the deep frown, one would have thought I’d said I was studying the Devil.

  “Have you read Brightman?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do,” he urged. “No one else makes perfect sense to me. Get the Nietzsche out of your system. He’s seductive for children—all that lust for power—but he’s really the one we’re fighting against.” He stood up, reaching into his wrinkled suitcoat slung over the back of a bedside chair for a pack of cigarettes. “Think about it.”

  “I will, sir, except right now we’ve got something … pretty strange outside.”

  “Strange?” He pursed his lips. “You didn’t say anything about strange before. Let me have it.”

  “I think you need to see him for yourself.”

  Wearily, he pulled on his wrinkled suitcoat, then his shoes. I could see that the short nap had helped not at all. The grumbling of his belly told me he must be hungry, that he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a day and a half, but checking the flat’s refrigerator, which never kept anything cold, would have to wait until he faced the unsettling reason I’d disturbed his slumber. Another leader, I knew, might have sent me away, calling attention to his trials, his suffering, his fatigue. For King that was out of character. Too many times he’d said, “It is possible for one to be self-centered in his self-sacrifice”—in other words, to use the pain of performing the Lord’s work to seek pity and sympathy. No, he never dwelled upon himself, and, although tired, he buttoned his suitcoat and stepped with je
lly-legged exhaustion from the darkened bedroom, forcing his lips into a smile as he followed me down the hallway to the living room.

  Waiting in the kiln-hot kitchen, seated in a straight-backed chair, was Amy. I felt her presence before my eyes found the imprint of the simple cross under her white blouse, her denim skirt, and the Afro, an aureole black as crow’s feathers, framing her face. She kept pushing a pair of black, owl-frame glasses back up the narrow bridge of her nose—a student’s gesture, I’d thought during the first few weeks when she volunteered for the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. Her voice was low and smoky. Some nights it ran rill-like through my head. She was a Baptist, raised since the age of six by her grandmother on Chicago’s South Side after the death of her mother following a beating—one of many—from her father, who worked for the railroad and gambled away his meager earnings at the race track. Thus it was her grandmother—Mama Pearl, as she called her—who’d taken care of Amy. Earlier that summer she’d invited Mama Pearl to drop by the Lawndale flat and meet the minister. And so she did, wheezing up the stairs, crepitations like crackling cellophane sounding in her chest with each breath, struggling with her body’s adipose freight, hauling a brown weathered handbag big enough for a child to crawl into, and announced, “Usually I don’t go nowhere on the third. That’s when my husband comes.” For a second she watched King mischievously, then said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”