Dreamer Page 4

  They held him for a long time, first at the station, then at an institution in Elgin, because when the police knocked on his door, discovered it open, then stepped inside, they found Juanita’s three boys strangled in their beds and pieces of their mother distributed here and there throughout the apartment. When they told him, Smith wept in his cell. He swore he knew nothing about it. Twice he passed a polygraph test. They could not convict him of the crime, but they did send him to Elgin, where he worked sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes with other patients cleaning up the grounds around the hospital, and met with doctors who spent two years helping him patch together the broken pieces of his personality. When he was released, there was nowhere for him to go except to Vera Thomas, who gave him back his old room and accepted the little he could offer her from what he made doing odd jobs, here and there, on the South Side.

  After a silence, Smith and King drew breath at the same instant. The minister let Smith speak first.

  “Like I said, Reverend, I been tryin’ like hell to get back on my feet, to do somethin’ worthwhile with my life.”

  “If we can achieve our goals for equality here, I think things will be better for you.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  “Excuse me?” The minister scratched his cheek.

  “I guess you think the Lord puts us all here with a definite purpose, don’t you?”

  “That’s right. Everyone is equal in His eyes.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  King was silent, perhaps uncertain of what to say, or so challenged by the sharpness of Smith’s voice that his own thoughts were stilled.

  “Sir, I need work. That’s all I’m asking for. Right now I can’t rub two dimes together. Problem is, there ain’t too many places that’ll hire me. But I figure there is maybe one thing I can do, if you’re willin’, and I been praying night and day you will be.”

  “What is that?”

  “I read that when you was in Montgomery you got over forty death threats a day—is that so?”

  “Yes,” the minister said, nodding, “and I still get them.”

  “That woman who stabbed you? Weren’t you signing books when that happened? The knife come within an inch of your heart, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I coulda been there instead of you,” said Smith.

  “What?”

  “When you go somewhere or leave a place, I could be there too, and if somebody’s tryin’ to hurt you, they won’t know whichaway to turn. That’s all I’m askin’, that you let me do somethin’—maybe the only thing in this world—I can do.”

  “No.” The minister stood up so suddenly the back of his legs sent his chair skidding a foot behind him. “Absolutely not. I could never agree to anything like that.”

  Smith smiled bitterly. “Thought you might say that. You ain’t the first person to turn me away. Or to take a shot at me ’cause I favor you so much.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I been catching hell since you come to Chicago.

  Last week a couple of boys pushed me off the El platform.” Smith measured five inches between his forefinger and thumb. “I was ’bout that far from landin’ on the third rail. Lots of people know where you’re stayin’ in town, but some don’t. They see me and come to my place. Some of ’em tore up my room. Scared my landlady so much she’s askin’ me to leave. But where am I gonna go? Hell, I can’t walk down the street or go to the store without somebody stoppin’ me. Some of ’em spit in my face. That’s colored as well as white. That’s why I come here. I figure if I’m catchin’ hell ’cause of you, I might’s well catch it for you instead.”

  “You’ve no place to stay?”

  “Not after tomorrow.”

  The minister made a sharp intake of breath. He rubbed the back of his neck, then paced back and forth in the kitchen, perhaps thinking—as I had been all evening—of that ancient Christian story of the couple who found a bedraggled old man at their door, invited him inside, fed and comforted him, and only after their guest left discovered he was the Nazarene. Finally King took his seat. “Would you all come here with me at the table? Mr. Smith has suffered much. I’d like to say a prayer for him.”

  Amy and I sat down; she was to my left, the minister to my right, and Smith directly in front of me. We joined hands and closed our eyes. Looking back, I cannot recall the whole content of King’s prayer, but it was appropriate, an affirmation that all, regardless of circumstance, were loved by the Lord. And I would not have opened my eyes before he’d finished, but I felt pressure beneath the table on my left foot, a gentle tapping like a lover’s signal. Thinking this was Amy, hoping it was so, I let my lids blink open, and saw that Smith had never closed his eyes. He was staring at us—like a fugitive peering at a comfortable bourgeois family through their window as they eat dinner, oblivious to his presence—and on his face was that unsettling smile as he critically scrutinized King, then Amy, who gripped his hand tightly (heaven knows what she was thinking). And then, tilting his head, tapping my foot again, he winked.

  I felt my face stretch. I squeezed shut my eyes, but his afterimage burned in the space behind my lids long after the prayer was done.

  King turned to Smith and said, “Could you step outside?”

  After Smith left, the minister rubbed his forehead. “I swear to God, I don’t know how to help this man, but I feel we should do something for him. What he proposes … it’s just too dangerous!”

  “Sir,” I said, “it sounds like he’s already a target. You might say his resemblance to you has marked him.”

  “Yes, yes.” He kneaded his lower lip. “Amy, when your grandmother was here, did Mama Pearl say she grew up downstate?”

  “Yes,” said Amy. “Her old house is there. It’s empty. No one is living there now.”

  “Could he stay there?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’d like you and Matthew to stay with him, at least until the disturbance is over and we’re finished here in Chicago. I want you to work with him. Get him back on his feet. Help him understand what the Movement’s about—and have him sign the Commitment Blank.”

  “What about you?” Amy asked. “Won’t you need us here?”

  “I think we’ll be all right. We’ll find somebody to replace you.” He stepped toward the kitchen door. Turning, he added, “I’ll see that you’re both compensated for this, of course,” and then he started toward the bedroom and stopped. “One other thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You keep that man away from my wife, you hear?”

  I assured him we would not let Smith, who was still waiting outside, anywhere near his family. I walked down the hallway, opened the front door, and found our visitor sitting on the top step, smoking. Keeping a few feet between us, I said, “Chaym, it’s okay. Doc’s going to find something for you to do.” Cautiously, I smiled. “He thinks you might be able to help.”

  “Yeah, and maybe I can do something special for you too. You interest me, Bishop. You’ve got promise.”

  “For what?”

  The only answer Smith gave was his mocking, mordant grin.

  I swallowed with difficulty. When I spoke, my voice splintered, and he seemed to enjoy that. “I’ll call you tomorrow with more details. Is that all right? I really do hope he gives you a job.”

  “A job?” Now Smith was descending the first few steps into the shadows, his profile lighted in such a way that I could see only fragments of his face, like pieces of an unfinished puzzle, or a mask. “I don’t want just a job, Bishop. Uh-uh. I want a li’l of what the good doctor in there has got in such great abundance.”

  “What is that?”

  Now I could see his face not at all, though I heard his shoes striking the lower stair treads, and from below, on the lightless levels where he stood, like a voice rising up beneath the ground, I thought I heard him say, Immortality.

  2

  Hours after his visitor left, he tried again
to rest, knowing he should, not for himself but for the others who depended upon him being at his best. Lying awake, tossing and turning, he looked back on his life and saw only a gauntlet of work, ever more difficult exercises in giving. In the corner a dented fan clacked as its blades turned. He’d kicked his bedcovers onto the floor and sprawled on his back in teal-blue pajamas with gold piping on the placket and around the neck, hoping if he was motionless sleep might come. But his mind churned on. He squinted at the ceiling where he saw, in broken plaster, the face of the strange man who had shaken his certainty that all were equal in the eyes of the Lord. The words still echoed in the deepest coils of his ears. Words Smith had almost hissed, hurling them at him like stones and with such hurt that he, about to open his mouth in a parable, offering one of his standard apothegms for suffering, stopped as if he’d been slapped. All his explanations were suspended, bracketed, and shimmering in their place was the ineluctable presence of this man who could have been his brother were it not for the fact that he appeared to be damned. Or fallen.

  Yes, he could admit it now: their physical likeness frightened him. What were the chances of encountering a double for oneself? Yet there he’d been, as if his own father had spit them out one, two. Like that. And what had he wanted? A job as his decoy? My God, didn’t he have enough trouble already? How strange it always was: someone standing before him, wanting something, and even more incredible than their desire was the belief that he could actually do something for them. (Things had reached a point where he even had to be careful how he complimented others in his letters because some would excerpt his praise, without his permission, in letters of reference.) In the apartment’s close air, in the narrow hallway, in the kitchen, Smith’s scent and vestigial spirit lingered, as if he’d subtly altered the flat—nothing felt the same after his appearance. He’d retreated to the bedroom after the man left.

  But it was not this feeling of displacement that now kept him awake, endlessly readjusting the lumpy pillow beneath his head. It was what Smith had said. The acuity, the clarity with which he’d dismissed “equality” and all that hallowed word implied. There in the predawn shadows, in the unveiling parenthesis into which Smith’s coming placed his most cherished beliefs, he wondered if perhaps it was no more than a word, an abstraction, empty sound signifying nothing. A chimera at the Movement’s core, in fact, the very centerpiece of Jefferson’s magnificent declaration, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Across America, from one platform and podium to the next, he’d sung that sacred principle—equality—as his strongest, last best hope for proclaiming that Americans could not live up to their bedrock ideals if Negroes were disenfranchised. Even his critics tipped lightly around this metaphysical trump card. Still a few tried, albeit timidly (so as not to seem like bigots), the casuists eager to point out that no two things in Nature were equal. Believing so, they said, was simply formulating sincerity (and sentimentality) into dogma. All right, he’d replied. Fine. On the face of things, Nature was unjust. Who could deny that? But in the realm of the spirit invoked by the Founders, in God, there were no defensible social distinctions, for all creatures great and small, black and white, were isomers of the divine Person. It was a shamelessly Platonic argument, he knew that, yet of its veracity he’d been so sure.

  At least until now.

  He rolled to the side of the bed, the springs in his mattress squeaking; his fingers fumbled on the nightstand, then found his watch and cigarettes. The glowing, beryline numbers read 4:30. In an hour it would be daybreak. He knew that as soon as sunlight knifed through the windows he wouldn’t sleep. After taking off his pajama top, moist and clammy and clinging to his body, he padded barefoot and barechested along the buckled, pewter-gray linoleum to the bathroom, sweat like a sprinkling of silver along his shoulders and chest. When he pulled the light bulb’s chain, a cataract of black and brown cockroaches in the porcelain sink, on the walls, and in the tiny claw-footed bathtub scrambled away from the light. They fled behind the cabinet and into the cracks where floor and walls joined, some dragging translucent lunular eggs behind them. Instantly he felt ill. Since he’d moved into the flat they were in his food, his clothing, his luggage. One had crawled out of his suitcoat when he was in a meeting, dropping obscenely onto the papers spread before him at the conference table. Filthy things! he thought. A constant companion of the poor. When he was eight, his mother told him that where you saw one, you could bet there were hundreds more hidden. All at once he was tempted to quash them into pulp with his fingers. But no. He pulled back, willing himself away from violence, remembering the holy men he’d seen one night in Kerala, the twig-broom-carrying Jain priests who killed nothing, ever, and swept in front of themselves as they walked so as not to harm creatures too small to see. They walked in these words: Whatever it is, it is you. No, as much as he might want to, he could not harm even these loathsome things without harming himself. The exercise of reining in his revulsion would do him good, he thought, maybe even make him thankful to something he hated for giving him the opportunity to work through his disgust. So he waited, taking long breaths to steady himself, watching them flee and wondering, until the last one disappeared, if Chaym awoke every day to a crawling bathroom like this.

  He ran warm water (it seldom got cold) into his cupped hands, splashed it onto his face, and, looking up, peered at himself in the tiny cabinet mirror above the sink, experimentally touching his cheeks, his chin (he realized he needed to shave), and tracing two fingers across the length of his mustache. My face, he thought. And Chaym’s. But in no other way than the somatic were they equal. In fact, they were like negatives of each other. He laughed, humorlessly. The idea of justice in his life and Chaym’s was a joke. Not only was the distribution of wealth in society grossly uneven, he thought, but so was God-given talent. Beauty. Imagination. Luck. And the blessing of loving parents. They were the products of the arbitrariness of fortune. You could not say they were deserved.

  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 Lo
uis, 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.