Dreamer Page 8

His fingers tightened round his empty cup until it shattered, obliterating inside and out. He took a deep breath. In resistance to oppression, he realized, there was fear of reprisals, in acquiescence the annihilation of self-worth, in fame the fear of humiliation, in strength the fear of enemies, in social stature the fear of slander, in health the fear of illness, in beauty the fear of old age, in scholarship the fear of disputants, in living … the certainty of death. His thoughts churned on, complicated, exotic. He felt too tired to move, but his mind, from surface to seabed, kept whirring widdershins.

  At last he began to pray. To whom—or what—he could not say. Not asking for anything then. Not fighting, only confessing, “Lord, I have nothing left …” His gaze drifted to the fragments of the cup that was no longer a cup. But where had the “cup” gone? His fist opened, disappearing into his hand. Where had his “fist” gone? Then it came quietly, unbidden. He was traveling light again, for the long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, the very belief in an “I” that suffered and strained to affect the world, dissolved, and for the first time he felt like a dreamer gently roused from sleep and forgetfulness. Awake, he saw he was not the doer. How could he have ever believed otherwise? That which he’d thought practiced virtue, surrendered to vice, held degrees, opinions and elaborated theories, and traveled toward a goal was spun from a spiderweb of words, no more real than the cantels of the erstwhile cup before him. Later, he would tell reporters and his congregation the room was rayed with shadowless light, and the Lord said unto him, Stand up for righteousness, stand up for the truth, and God will be at your side forever, but in fact the light came from him—not without—and the vox Dei he heard had been his own. Not I, he heard it whisper again in the suddenly transparent kitchen, but the Father within me doeth the works … I seek not my will but the will of the Father who sent me …

  The stewardess’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “The captain has turned off the seat-belt sign. You are free to walk around the cabin if you wish.”

  He struggled with the seat belt cutting into his belly and made a note to himself to push back a little earlier from banquet tables in the future. Finally the buckle sprang open, and he brought down the tray tucked into the seat in front of him. From his briefcase he removed the unfinished pages of his sermon and spread them before him, still thinking of his “Kitchen Conversion.” He’d not experienced anything quite like it thereafter. Now it was a faint memory, like first love, but he knew enough to trust the Lord to remove any obstacles—himself included—placed in the way of his ministry. Needless to say, that perplexed most of his aides, the purely political ones. Again and again they told him letting God handle little details was fine at Ebenezer but if he hoped to stay at the forefront of the Movement he damned well needed to organize his campaigns better Perhaps Chicago was proving them right. There were factors he had not foreseen. Down South the lives of whites and blacks were impeached to such a degree that bloodlines and surnames were shared. Like it or not, they were one people created in the cauldron of the Peculiar Institution. There was nothing uncommon about white babies nursing at the breasts of a black housekeeper. White politicians had a Negro (and most likely an Indian) hiding somewhere back in their family tree. If you went back to A.D. 700, everyone on earth had a common ancestor; no two persons, regardless of their race, could be less closely related than fiftieth cousins. Each man and woman on the planet today was a direct descendant of Jesus, Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, Tutankhamen, and Judas Iscariot. And, oh, interrelatedness went farther than even that. Each of the twenty thousand breaths we drew each day contained a quadrillion atoms breathed by the rest of humanity within the past week, and one’s next breath brimmed with more than a million atoms that once swirled within the chests of Anaximander, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Vivekananda, and the Aborigines of Australia. Given that ground of overlapping lives one could hope that once the artificial, legal barriers to integration were removed, the children of masters and slaves might recognize that Race was an illusion, all children were literally—genetically—their own, and embrace one another as members of a single tribe.

  Yes, he knew the South. The North, of course, was another matter. Northern cities, he was ready to believe, were, as the Book of Genesis claimed, the products of Cain. Mercifully, they were behind him for another weekend.

  And now the stewardess was moving his way, struggling with the editions it would take him over an hour to individually sign for her loved ones. Joints in his fingers would throb, he’d have to soak his hand later in a pan of hot water, as he often did after standing in receiving lines and pressing the flesh with thousands of admirers. And that was just all right. As Abu Sa‘id, an Islamic scholar he admired, might put it, there was nothing inside the blue coat and skirt Stephanie was wearing except Allah.

  5

  We stayed on State Route 51 south from Carbondale, following a map Amy scrawled on the back of SCLC stationery as Smith did impersonations of the waitress Arlene and the old man in the Pit Stop. He was a remarkably talented mimic, I realized during the rest of the ride, and so scathingly funny in his interpretations that even while Amy and I laughed until tears cascaded down our cheeks, which helped me forget for a while my shame at the damage I’d done to the diner (every police car we passed made me squirm down in my seat), I was afraid to think of Smith applying his imitative skills on me. The possibility of seeing things as he did, from the oblique angle of alienation, fascinated and frightened me at the same time; he was so antithetical to King, yet in some ways I saw in Smith the distillation of the minister’s message to a black student he met at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania, young man so consumed by anger and hatred and dualism that all King could say was, “Son, the best thing you can do is try to understand yourself.” Smith forced me to think on this, to turn it over and over, and inspect it from every side: My Self. Yet for all his similarities to King, his talk earlier about envy and divine rejection put me on edge—indeed, had briefly pushed me over it. My skinned knuckles were sore and I’d cut my left forearm when smashing bottles on the counter. In other words, I’d injured myself quite as much as I’d wasted the Pit Stop. And it was his—Chaym Smith’s—doing. But slowly, as I saw him slip effortlessly into Arlene’s physical eccentricities, I began to feel that, for all his exasperating qualities, perhaps he could stand in for King, and told him so.

  “Sure, I can mark him,” he said. “That’s easy. Everybody’s playing a role anyway, trying to act like what they’re supposed to be, wearing at least one mask, probably more, and there’s nothing underneath, Bishop. Just emptiness …”

  The Chevelle coasted down a dusty road trenched between enormous trees that domed overhead, breaking sunlight into flecks of leaf-filtered brilliance that flickered on a road that wound past a dilapidated Methodist church and ended in front of a rough farmhouse. It seemed to spring up suddenly out of kudzu vines and broomsedge, a one-story structure erected on rocks: it floated above these huge stones like a raft, shadowed by a double-trunked oak tree in the yard. Paint on the front porch was peeling away in large strips like sunburned skin. The yard, wild with windblown weeds, was as uncultivated as a backfield full of burdocks and snakes. I cannot say I was relieved to arrive at this remote, rural destination. The heat was withering. Out there more than two miles from the highway, and possibly three to the nearest store, there were none of the distractions to rescue a man at night from the feelings and thoughts he least wanted to confront.

  Or from the strangeness of Chaym Smith.

  Skeptically he squinted at the dilapidated house. “Anybody living in this dump?”

  “Not this summer.” Amy’s brow pleated. “And it’s not a dump. Mama Pearl rents it out to kids over at the college. At her age she doesn’t like to live so far from other people. It’s furnished inside and she’s never asked for more than what she needs to pay the taxes and keep her place upstate, but it’s been empty since June. That church we passed up the road? Most of our family is buried in a cemetery there �
�”

  Smith cut off the engine, and we unloaded the car, lugged boxes inside to dusty rooms with drop cloths covering the sparse, old-fashioned furnishings while Amy explained that her great-grandfather James, a preacher, framed each room and drove half the nails in the farmhouse as well as in the church just a quarter mile away.

  Talking about her family was a natural, innocent enough thing to do, and she could not have known, nor I, how it would draw out even more of Smith’s cynicism. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Is this gonna be a long story?”

  I shot him a stare to shut him up as Amy opened stiff chintz curtains in the front room, flooding it with light. “Go on,” I said, “You were saying something about your great-grandfather. What was he like?”

  She was silent, looking around the room, remembering, and I was struck again by her beauty, the melic lift of her voice when Amy said she didn’t know her great-grandfather all that well, but his daughter, Mama Pearl, often invoked her father as industrious and loving and quick to load his rifle if he caught the faintest trace of discrimination directed at either his kin or himself, though as a family the Griffiths seldom came into contact with whites, no more often than did, say, the Negroes who founded the town of Allensworth in California or other all-black hamlets at the turn of the century. Whites may not have liked them, but James—her grandmother told her—never asked to be liked, only respected. And that was a matter fully within their own control. They grew their own food before and after the crash that crippled the nation in ’29. They operated a school for their children at the nearby church, one so successful in teaching metalwork that its graduates were considered the best smiths in the county and had work come rain or shine in the twenties.

  Amy walked us through rooms of antique furniture—ladderbacked chairs, heavy oak tables, an old black walnut Jefferson bookstand fastened with mortise-and-tenon joinery—and for me it was like being gently led into the past, a distant, better time when black people were the moral fiber of a nation. She said that during her visits in the 1950s to Makanda nothing pleased her so much as how self-reliant her relatives and their neighbors seemed. There were inconveniences, of course. Water came from a well. Thirty paces from the back door was an outhouse she hated to visit in the middle of the night. But she loved seeing her kin making their own clothes and furniture and bartering with other black people in the area for the little they could not produce themselves. She remembered her great-grandfather, who, if he came across something he especially liked on his dinner plate, saved that portion of the meal for last; when he flipped through the newspaper and saw an item that interested him, he scanned everything else on that page first and held off satisfying his desire for that one particular news report until he’d made himself read everything around it. Throughout Jackson County her kin were known as the people black travelers should see if they were turned away from white hotels and needed a room for the night and a good meal the next morning. As might be expected, they had no tolerance for phoniness or pretense. They did not judge others by their possessions, dress, family pedigree, or how often they got their names in the newspaper. Family and friends came first. And they did not hesitate to share what little they had, whether it was food, labor, their home, or the skills each had developed in order to survive. She said they were known to hold on to a dollar until it hollered. (And James often discussed Negro entrepreneurs he admired, and urged his children to take as their example people like merchant Jean-Baptiste Du Sable, one of Chicago’s earliest settlers, Madame Walker, Philadelphia’s catering king Robert Bogle, and colored people who controlled America’s service businesses before World War II, to say nothing of owning their own banks and insurance companies.) James’s children, Mama Pearl and her two brothers, were never pampered. He insisted that from birth to age five his progeny be treated like princes and princesses, but after that they were to work like servants, even if what they did consisted in nothing more than fetching things for the other folks. (He suggested they sing as they worked to lighten the labor.) No, Amy said, he could not tolerate idleness, and it was not in his nature to ask anyone for anything.

  As we traipsed through the old house, its floorboards creaking beneath our feet, Smith responded to Amy’s family history with a contemptuous pfft! from his pursed lips, which puzzled me, because I almost felt that as Amy spoke I could hear her ancestors’ day beginning with breakfast-table prayer, which did not exclude even the youngest children; they had to know chapter and verse before their twelfth birthday. There were no spirits in this household. In my mind, I saw James—a tall, dark-skinned, suspender-wearing black man—insisting that his two sons and daughter, Amy’s grandmother, acquire as many skills as they had fingers on their hands, work for everything they received, and treat whatever possessions any family member had as carefully and conscientiously as if they belonged to someone else who one day might ask for their return. The family, he told them again and again, was far more than a group bonded by blood. More even than a collective that insured the survival of its members. More than anything else, according to the Griffith patriarch, it was the finest opportunity anyone would have for practicing selflessness, for giving to others day in, day out, and for this privilege, this chance to outgrow his own petty likes and dislikes, opinions and tastes, he gave abundant thanks. If they wanted to be happy, he counseled them, the first step was to make someone else happy. Through Amy’s words I saw him demand that his children read after their chores were finished—what, he didn’t care, but he wouldn’t talk with them if two days had gone by and they’d not touched a book. (Smith was looking at his watch, frowning heavily; her story so displeased and rattled him that he entered one of the bedroom doorways at the same instant I did, and for a second we were stuck, shoulder to shoulder, our arms pinned at our sides, Chaplinesque, until I jerked free.) Eventually, she explained, the farm could not sustain itself. By the late 1950s, his sons left to find work elsewhere. Mama Pearl did the same, moving to Chicago, where she was steadily employed at Fanny’s Restaurant in the suburb of Evanston, and possession of the property came to her when her mother died in 1963.

  Now we were in the kitchen. Smith glowered darkly out the window, cracking his knuckles. I tried to ignore him. I said to Amy, “Your people lived like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I’d known your great-grandfather.” In the depths of me I did. Partly I was envious, knowing so little of my own family’s past before they migrated from the South to the city; and partly I hungered for the sense of history she had, the confidence and connectedness that came from a clear lineage stretching back a century. “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

  “He was.” Amy laughed. “Mama Pearl told me he used to say over and over, ‘Life is God’s gift to you; what you do with it is your gift to Him’”

  “Excuse me,” growled Smith. “I need to shit.”

  Amy flinched, as though he’d pinched her. She pointed through the window to an outhouse about fifty feet from the back door. Smith seemed anxious to flee the farmhouse and had one foot out the door when she said, “Wait,” reached into one of the boxes of SCLC materials we’d placed on the table, and brought out one of the Commitment Blanks distributed among volunteers. “I brought this along for you to sign.”

  I knew that form well, having signed one earlier in the year. On it were ten essential promises—like the tablets Moses hauled down from smoky Mount Sinai—the Movement asked of its followers. Seeing the form made me feel a little weak, insofar as I remembered the hundreds of times I’d failed to uphold these vows:

  COMMANDMENTS FOR VOLUNTEERS

  I HEREBY PLEDGE MYSELF—MY PERSON AND BODY—TO THE NONVIOLENT MOVEMENT THEREFORE I WILL KEEP THE FOLLOWING COMMANDMENTS:

  Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.

  Remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.

  Walk and Talk in the manner of love, for God is love.

  Pray daily to be used by God in orde
r that all men might be free.

  Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free.

  Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.

  Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world.

  Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.

  Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.

  Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.

  I sign this pledge, having seriously considered what I do and with the determination and will to persevere.

  NAME_____________________________ (Please print neatly)

  He tore it from her hand and tramped outside, his action so rude—so brusque—that it startled Amy and angered me. I followed him into the backyard, clamped my fingers on the crook of his arm, and spun him round to face me.

  “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “That story she told,” said Smith, “it’s a fucking lie. Front to back, it was kitsch. All narratives are lies, man, an illusion. Don’t you know that? As soon as you squeeze experience into a sentence—or a story—it’s suspect. A lot sweeter, or uglier, than things actually were. Words are just webs. Memory is mostly imagination. If you want to be free, you best go beyond all that.”

  “To what?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. By the way”—he held up the Commitment Blank and grinned—“tell her thanks for this. I need something to wipe with.”

  I stood and watched him squeeze into the outhouse and shut the door. I picked up a handful of rocks and pegged them against the wall. Inside, Smith laughed. He reminded me I owed him for saving my skin in Chicago, and kept on talking through the door, railing against conformity and convention, all the while emptying his bowels loudly, with trumpeting flatulence and gurgling sounds and a stink so mephitic it made me choke, then fleeing back into the farmhouse, I found Amy looking through his bags.