Dreamer (13 page)

To his credit and our incredulity, he absorbed the information we fed him like a sponge. But then again, the task
was not as daunting as it might seem, given his long, painful twelve-year obsession with the nation's most prominent preacher, and his own unusual gifts. Little by little, he learned that if there was a single philosophical law to the minister's life, an essence, it was embodied in three profound ideals. First, the deeper meaning of nonviolence, not merely as a strategy for protest, but as a Way, a daily praxis men must strive to translate into each and every one of their deeds. This Smith understood and compared to the Sanskrit word
ahimsa,
from
himsa
(“to injure”) and
a
(“no” or “not”), so that in its fullness King's moral stance implied noninjury to everything that exists. Second,
agape,
the ability to love something not for what it presently was (which might be quite unlovable, like George Wallace) but for what it could be, a teleological love that recognized everything as process, not product, and saw beneath the surface to a thing's potentiality. And last, the fact of integration as the life's blood of Being itself. As I explained this to Smith, it struck me that these were not separate ideals at all, only different sides of a single meditation nearly as old as humanity, a meditation that could be lapped and folded in as few as three words:

Others
first
.

Always.

That was the vision; everything else was mere detail. (Though the Devil, as always, was in the details.)

Nights, when he slept, crashing into unconsciousness, Smith placed close by his mattress a tape recorder that all night long softly played Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor,
“Moonlight” Sonata, Mahalia Jackson, and compositions by Harry T. Burleigh. Awakening the next day at 5
A.M.
, his eyes puffy, he put aside his razor, substituting for it the distinctly black ritual of shaving with the smelly depilatory powder (“Magic”) used by the minister and, if truth be told, millions of black men with sensitive skin. It lit up the farmhouse with
a smell like sulfur or eggs gone south after he mixed it with cold water, spread it on his face with a spatula, let it harden for five minutes, then scraped it off. But it wasn't enough for Smith to shave like King; he elected to eat as he did too, having Amy fix meals of the minister's favorite dishes—turnip greens, bacon drippings, and cornbread (food, King once confessed, was his greatest sin). I helped in the kitchen, reading to Amy from Mama Pearl's recipes, and shared with her the chore of washing (me) and drying (Amy) her family's plates, silverware, and pots after dinner. But no, I did not approach her again with my affections. I was even careful, when handing her a plate for drying, to keep two feet of distance between us, and I was at pains not to bump into her or touch her without her permission, or look at her for too long, or do
any
thing that would make her uncomfortable or remember how clumsily I'd cast my heart at her feet only to have her step around it like roadkill.

No doubt my behavior baffled her (which was nothing new). Like so many in the Movement, Amy was strong, serious, sure of herself and what things meant in the world. She was an Abelite, lost to ambiguity. I cannot lie; I loved her still. I'd believed that as Aquinas, that intractable Aristotelian, put it, a pious woman might lead a man to the Lord. Saint John of the Cross said it just as well,
amado con amada
. She might be his salvation, if he wedded his will to hers. (Clearly, this worked for King's father.) But I knew my love would never be returned. This asymmetry was not entirely unsatisfying. Because of Smith, I began to accept the sad inevitability of myself. With not being able to take sides (when one's choices were miserable). With the mark of loneliness, ipseity, Socratic doubts, interiority, and always having an afterthought. I felt at ease with (and less apologetic for) my bookishness, my inclination toward irony, and my sense that the world as it was, was unacceptable; I'd settled
on the fact that perhaps I lived best as a witness who withdrew and gained distance in order to become truly engaged. Still, I recognized something I loved in the community of the certain, the blessed, but thanks to Smith I hankered for it a little less than before and knew that whatever liberation I might look forward to was in my hands alone.

And there is also this to say:

I began to fear we were being watched. Although I said nothing to the others, late some nights a plain green Plymouth rolled up the road toward the farmhouse. Its headlights were off. The driver sat for long minutes, and I saw smoke spiraling up through one side window. We were miles from town; I wondered: Who would come this far? Whenever I rose from bed and ran barefoot to the road, the Plymouth's engine started, and the car was gone before I got there, nothing remaining of its presence except tire marks and black dottle from someone's pipe.

As I said, I did not want to frighten the others. Instead, I asked Smith to walk with me, just to get him away from his regimen of reading, to Giant City State Park, through the enclosure known as the Stone Fort, which once served as a site for Indian ceremonial purposes at the top of an eightyfoot stone cliff. As we walked I tried to convey capsule descriptions of existentialist theologians germane to the minister's intellectual genesis, and what little I'd gleaned from a hasty perusal of Edgar Brightman. Of Personalism there was precious little to say. Had King not written about its value to him in reinforcing his belief in a loving, divine Father on high when he was in college (in contrast to Paul Tillich's monistic, impersonal God as the “Ground of Being”), Personalism as a philosophy would be as dead as Neoplatonism. None of the abstract portraits of the Lord offered by Tillich, Plotinus, Spinoza, or Eastern mystics could satisfy a Baptist
preacher's boy. Thus the Boston Personalists, and Crozer professor L. Harold DeWolf's conception of a self-limited, temporal Father who bore man's face and flaws, hopes and values, impacted on Kings vision more than any other; if Martin imagined the Lord, the odds were good that He looked (and behaved) more than a little like Daddy King. For DeWolf, God was immersed in creation, His power willingly curtailed by human freedom. He was not a prescient deity. His holiness was entangled in the bloody advance of history. Future events unfolding in this intentionally less than best of all possible worlds might take Him by surprise. He did not will suffering. Evil on earth was beyond his control, but in the Father's contract with His children, evil was an opportunity for spiritual growth and triumph. The Devil could not prevail, for as man struggled from innocence through sin to redemption he waged a war on His behalf to realize history's goal of the Heavenly City, the kingdom. King, I explained, accepted some restrictions on God's power, but could not—would not—believe for a second that He lacked absolute control of events predestined to lead to social liberation and the beloved community.

On our way back to the Nest, tramping along quietly at my side with his hands folded across his midsection (a carry-over from his temple training, the position known as
shashu,
“forked hands”), his brow furrowed, Smith was brooding. Out of the corner of my eye, I checked him, uneasy by how now he seemed more like the minister than before. “I'm starting to see something,” he said. “Martin don't hold back nothing for himself.” We tramped on, his silence freighted as he wrestled with his thoughts. “He's about total surrender, giving it all to God. I been trying to get a handle on him, but sometimes it's like he ain't there. Like he's an instrument, not the music itself—a conduit for something else that's always just outta my reach.”

“Do you have faith?” I asked.

“What?”

“I said, do you have faith, Chaym?”

“Naw.” His brow tightened. “None. How
could
I? If you're saying that's why I've got the shell but not the substance, fuck you, Bishop. There's nothing
but
shell, far as I can see. And I'm ready now. You understand? I can do anything
he
does. Just watch me—and I'll fucking do it better.”

The call from Doc came on August 4.

Routinely, I'd driven into Carbondale to phone the Lawndale flat, report on Smith's progress, and keep abreast of the campaign in Chicago. The minister, whose voice was flat and tired, as if he could barely stay awake, asked if we could return for the Marquette march. In the background I heard arguing, voices I could not identify, but the heart of this contentious discussion seemed to center on the escalating backlash against King's lieutenants, some of them having picketed real estate agencies in the Belmont-Cragin area, and for their trouble saw their parked cars set on fire. SCLC and CCCO workers were at the end of their patience. When King was away, Andrew Young and Al Raby led fifteen hundred demonstrators (they were still falling far short of the turnout they needed) into an Irish-Lithuanian neighborhood near Marquette Park on July 30. The marchers were heckled by residents waving Confederate flags and homemade signs reading
NIGGER, HOW YOU WISH YOU WERE WHITE
and
SEGREGATION IS GOD'S PLAN
. Their parked cars were pushed into a lagoon. Predictably, the Chicago police were no help whatsoever. Their cousins and kin lived in these all-white enclaves; after pushing irate white residents into wagons with
CENTRAL DETENTION SERVICE
labeled on their rear doors they drove them a few blocks away and set them free. Those neighborhoods were explosive, someone in the rundown flat told
King. A powder keg waiting to be lit. The minister excused himself, asking me to hold, and I heard him say he agreed the moment was right for confrontation.

Waiting in a phone booth at a rural filling station six hours away from the city, I realized that our weeks downstate, away from newspapers and televisions, had thrown me out of step with the breathless pace of King's northern campaign. Chicago was still reeling from the riots. The monolith of de facto segregation had barely budged an inch. Blacks were squeezed into ten percent of the city's area, with only four percent living in the suburbs, where homes ran as high as $15,000. The CCCO, which gave priority to changing inferior education over economic boycotts, was battling to oust despised emblems of segregation in the schools like superintendent Benjamin C. Willis and a high school principal named Miss Chuchut. Yet despite setbacks by Democratic precinct ward-organizers who threatened the poor with loss of their welfare payments if they voted or protested, a degree of progress had been made. Using as their model the tactics of Philadelphia's Rev. Leon Sullivan, King's forces created a local chapter of Operation Breadbasket and designated as its director a University of Chicago theology student named Jesse Jackson in a move that ruffled the feathers of more than a few older activists, but the bold young minister did bring home the bacon when a boycott led to better employment for blacks with the Country Delight Dairy chain.

Nevertheless, too little had changed in a campaign that noisily blew into town promising to bring down the walls of economic racism once and for all. Real estate agencies were making a killing off white flight from neighborhoods that in just months turned completely black. Gun sales soared in Slavic districts, and I wondered, as the minister must have wondered, if it was possible to end social evil through actions that did not themselves engender a greater, more devastating
evil. Back in 1954, the newspapers had labeled the Montgomery Improvement Association's nonviolent bus boycott “Gandhian.” The Movement picked up the phrase later, and King was fond of saying Jesus provided the message, Gandhi the method for their social mission. But this was not entirely true. Nor, strictly speaking, faithful to Gandhi, who claimed
his
greatest ambition was “To make myself zero.” When asked for the secret of his life, the mahatma replied,
Tena tyaktena bhunjithah
(“Renounce and enjoy”). Howard University activists appropriated the approach of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 1940s, when King was still in college. His version derived from theirs, the Howard leaders who took the body but not necessarily the soul of the mahatma's method, the surface but not the deepest impulse to renounce materialism and egotism in all their manifestations. Far from being anchored in the dualism of the Christian book, Gandhi's methods drew from the Bhagavad Gita, which taught him, he insisted, that “those who desire salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” Selfless, humble, detached, living without privacy so that his life was perfectly transparent, seeking no personal gain or profit, indefatigable, Gandhi could meet any social conflict head-on for those he loved, and his intention was never to humiliate or beat down his opponent.
How to end evil without engendering error or evil
. The question had apparently slowed down Howard's activists and the SCLC and the CCCO not at all.

Back on the phone, asking the others in the room to hold the noise down, the minister said, “You can be here then? We need everyone now to help …”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We'll be there by morning.”

Although uneventful, the ride north took longer by two hours because the Chevelle blew a fan belt outside Centralia, and I had to hike to a service station, buy a replacement, then
walk back to the car. Smith rode in back with Amy, wearing one of the minister's dark blue suits, his patterned tie, and clockface cufflinks. From head to toe he was as immaculate as the minister himself when he attended Morehouse and was affectionately known as Tweed. As spit-shined as King felt he had to be at Crozer to bury the stereotype of the Negro as slovenly. Just hours earlier, Amy'd packed his hair with Murray's Pomade so the waves stood out in neat little rows; she'd creamed his face with Nadinola to clear up a few of his pimples, and he'd splashed on some of the minister's favorite aftershave lotion, Aramis. On the whole, Smith looked uncomfortable in a suit, with a starched white collar squeezing his throat. And perhaps he was nervous, afraid he would fail at this job he'd petitioned for just as he'd failed at everything else. (And no, we could not keep Smith from strapping on his .357 Magnum, despite my telling him that King, while he did not oppose self-defense, felt edgy if anyone around him wore firearms because years before one of his bodyguards in the South had nearly shot a paperboy.) Amy kept inspecting him, pinching lint off his jacket and from his hair, wetting her handkerchief and rubbing at spots of shaving powder still on his jaw. Surely working so closely with him had been as much a trial for her as it was for me. At the Nest, I noticed that whenever Smith spoke disparagingly about other races—Jews, Chinese, or whites—Amy's eyes glazed over and grew quiet; they became distant, wall-like, and a sadness fell around her like a scrim. It was not in her nature to make sweeping remarks about any race or group. By the time we returned to the city, Smith, knowing he needed our help, and not wishing to displease her, had shed generalizations of that kind, at least when around Amy.