Our Man in the Dark

by Rashad Harrison

  Once again, the night has found something in me worth saving and granted me clemency. Few are so fortunate. I think of poor Lucinda, alone in that motel room. When her lover doesn’t show up, she’ll be expecting her daddy to come and save her. I walk through the night streets, clumsily trying to find my way home. Sounds, some unfamiliar, echo inside my head until I realize their source. When I was a child, some bullies made fun of my limp, so I made fun of their inability to read, halting stammer and all. They took me out to the creek behind the school and beat me badly. I was fine with the beating, I was used to that, but they took my brace and left me there, helpless. I cried for hours, but no one came for me. It was starting to get dark, so I had to find a way home. I crawled around on my belly like an animal until I found a fallen branch that was strong enough to support me, yet small enough to control. One step at a time, I made my way out of the creek and onto the city streets. Maybe that’s how my brother did it. I was exhausted and it seemed like it took forever. It did. But all I could think about was how disappointed my father would be when he saw how someone got the best of me and how that would be the likely pattern of my life. When he opened the door, he looked at my swollen face and gimp leg covered in scrapes and scratches, but then he looked at the branch that I’d used as a crutch. He took it from me, held me up with one arm, and with the other, he held up the branch. “At least you made it home,” he said, squeezing me tightly. “You made it home.”

  They are surprised to see me at this late hour, which turns to shock when they become aware of my horrific state. Immediately, my mother starts with the questions, but my father tells her to let me be. He sees the blood on my face and on my clothes. He sees the wound on my shoulder and tells me not to worry, the bullet only grazed me and he’ll stitch it up himself. He sees that something has beaten me down and tried its best to kick the life out of me. He doesn’t need to know what it is exactly. He just knows that after a rough night, I made it home. I survived. While running liquor, he must have seen many men come home like this. He must have come home like this. He doesn’t ask me questions. He just sits next to me, silent, in that disciplined way of the bootlegger, while I lie in bed, grateful for life and eager for sleep.

  1968

  I’m not much of a religious man. I guess I’m only a Christian out of habit and inheritance. So it’s fitting that I had to escape from one hell only to find another one waiting for me.

  California did not disappoint. Upon my arrival, Watts went up in flames. An inferno of pent-up anger and frustration, the sky seemed permanently black with smoke. Black bodies did their familiar dance of violence and despair. It felt appropriate, as if I had brought all that bad fortune with me. I did not participate but I welcomed it, foolishly thinking that my survival through the ordeal might bring me closer to redemption.

  Was it the level of destruction or that strange connection we had? I don’t know, but he decided to follow me. But what he offered they had no use for. Not here. That talk of peace and love was already a dead and forgotten language here. They laughed at him, challenged his wisdom, called him a fool, and sent him packing, back to his dreamed-up Utopia.

  That negativity, that dark pall must have stayed with him, soaking into his clothes, his hair, his skin, because it soured everything he touched. Everyone he came around thought he was stale, a relic. He came back to chants of Black Power! It was more than a slogan—he had entered a world where cynicism reigned. Still, he did not give up. He actually went to Chicago, but despite his best efforts, that city too erupted. Little seedlings of hate blossomed wherever he went. His failures mounted to the point that he was forced to lead from the margins, crafting messages that were viewed as less than strategies and more like corny advertisements of love and tolerance. The rest of the country had caught wind of vengeance and disappointment. There were graveyards full of optimists.

  I have been in hiding. Maybe the word “exile” is more appropriate. Something about LA drew me back to it. I’m sure it helped that it is a world away from the rest of the country. You can lose yourself here, and no one will ever find you . . . or so I thought.

  I paid back the SCLC in anonymous donations, thanks to a little tax business I opened to help working-class Negroes file their returns. I see young orderlies, jaded garbagemen, and even the occasional colored nursing assistant, but I never thought I’d see a nearly middle-aged FBI agent.

  “How goes it, old friend?” Strobe asks without smiling.

  I offer him a seat, and he keeps his hat and sunglasses on.

  “It’s good to see you’re doing well, John.”

  I look at him and nod.

  “You left quite a mess back there in Atlanta, didn’t you?”

  “What do you want, Strobe?”

  Strobe takes off his hat and sunglasses, puts the glasses inside the hat and rests them on his lap. He reaches into his pocket, then throws down a pack of those foreign cigarettes that Mathis introduced me to. He looks serious now. “Your friend the preacher is in trouble. I’ve heard through the grapevine that things could get ugly in Memphis.” Martin is in Memphis supporting the sanitation workers’ strike. It’s been all over the news.

  “What do you mean by ‘ugly’ ? Martin’s seen more violence than some World War II veterans.”

  “I mean the kind of ugly I, you, or anyone shouldn’t know about. The anti–Vietnam War talk is earning him some special enemies.”

  I smirk at him. “Could these enemies be any more dangerous than Hoover’s boys in their gray suits and narrow ties?”

  Strobe reaches over and retrieves one of the cigarettes. “Do you mind?” he asks.

  “Go right ahead,” I say as I push over the ashtray.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been okay about how things went back there. It pushed me to my limit. The good thing is it helped me to learn what kind of man I am, and what kind of man I am not. Mathis wasn’t always that way. The job just got to him.”

  “What are you asking me to do, Strobe?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything. This time I am providing you with the information. Do with it what you will. I just think someone should talk to him, warn him, tell him to ease up a little. Obviously it can’t be me.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Strobe?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you send those photos to Pete?”

  “Mathis was right—we were in it together. He needed to be reigned in, but you were right. I couldn’t do it.”

  “Who wrote that letter to Martin? You or Mathis?”

  Strobe stands and puts his glasses and hat on. The dark lenses reflect nothing. “Take care, John. I’ll be seeing you around.”

  “Only if you want help with your taxes,” I say as he walks out.

  I look at the cigarette still burning in the ashtray. I was always aware of the threat Martin faced. I never warned him. I pretended that it was because I was protecting him, but really, I was protecting myself: warning him would incriminate me.

  While I was away, I spun a narrative that would allow me to live with myself. Over time, however, it was not enough. When I left, I was primarily concerned with making things right—whatever that meant. I realize now that I cannot be right with myself unless I am right with him. I need him to know. Even if he doesn’t understand, I need him to know. I need him to forgive.

  It is a balmy night in Memphis when I arrive at the Mason Temple where he’s giving a rousing sermon to a congregation that looks like a swaying mass of church fans and sweat. He is sweating as well, profusely in fact, as if it were some self-willed physiological display of empathy. The church is crowded and there are no vacant seats, so I stand in the back among a group of people who have also failed to find seating.

  He walks the crowd through ancient Rome, the Renaissance period, and his battle with Bull Connor. He tells them of the demented woman that tried to kill him, and the broken tip of her blade that made the possibility of a sneeze a deadly threat. Then he sees me. I
can’t detect any bit of recognition. He continues with his speech. I begin to feel I may have made a mistake in coming here. I decide to wait until after his sermon to make any assumptions, but then he comes to a point in his speech where he says, “I’m not fearing any man,” and he looks me right in the eye, as if the line is intended for me. I feel as if a dagger has been thrown at my heart. I have failed. His disappointment is irrevocable. He finishes his speech and leaves the podium. He almost collapses but is propped up by Abernathy. The church vibrates with shouts and cheers.

  I understand now. I thought I understood then, but I didn’t. Martin possessed an even greater courage than I realized. His struggle was already mythic—already dangerous—just in its conception. I read somewhere once that there is nothing more difficult, more dangerous, or more uncertain than to take the lead and introduce a new order of things. All those who have done well under the old conditions are enemies of the innovator, and he has only lukewarm support from those who may succeed under the new. This resistance comes from fear of the opponents—who have the laws on their side—and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience with them. I thought that I was on his side, but I wasn’t. I never was. And not because of my admittedly self-serving actions, but because of my cynicism. I never believed in humanity as he did.

  It doesn’t help that we are both staying at the same place, the Lorraine Motel. I see him the next day talking to Abernathy and Young, but I don’t want them to see me, considering the state I was in the last time they saw me. I duck into a little diner next to the motel and order a cup of coffee to get my courage flowing. As soon as I reach the bottom of this cup, I’m going to apologize to him face to face. It’s a good thing my father isn’t alive to see this—the disgrace that will surely follow. I’m not sure if my apology will be a confession, or a warning, or a strange mixture of both, but for my own peace of mind, I need to tell him. I need to let him know that while I thought I was protecting him from the diabolic voyeurism of the FBI, I was jealous. Jealous of you, of the agents and how close they got to you. It seems they were always revealing some new detail about you to me, and I guess I foolishly believed that we had some sort of unspoken connection. I know it’s ridiculous and I made too much of it, but you need to know I am apologizing now and—

  A gunshot. Screams. From everyone. Everyone. I already know the answer, even before the young Negro woman runs in shaking horribly and screaming, “They shot Dr. King! They shot Dr. King!”

  All the patrons run out to see what has happened, if what this young girl has said is true. They hope she’s crazy. They pray she’s a disturbed prankster. They hope she’s a liar. If so, even though her joke is cruel, they’ll thank her and forgive her. But she’s not finished.

  “It’s over! It’s over!” she screams. I have never seen this woman before now, but I know, at this moment, it’s the most honest she has been in her life. “It’s over,” her tears flooding her face. She reaches for me and cries into my shoulder. I know I should be crying too, feeling what she’s feeling. I want to but I am not. My heart races. I haven’t thought about her in a while, I’ve tried not to, but the smell of this woman’s hair brings Candy to mind. Maybe I’m holding this woman a little too tightly, but she doesn’t seem to care.

  It takes me a while to pry her away and make it outside. The screaming crowd and the crying sirens make a terrifying marriage of sounds. The bloody balcony is even visible from here. One foot pokes over the edge. Abernathy, Young, Jackson, they are all around him, kneeling over his body. Then suddenly, they stand, all of them, and point. I know they are not pointing in my direction, especially with all these people and the chaos, I am certain that they do not even know that I am here. But I can’t help fearing that they are pointing at me. They aren’t, but I can’t stop seeing it that way. It seems that everything has gone abruptly silent. I feel as if the crowd has collectively turned their many eyes toward me. I swallow and step back. I’m getting that feeling I know all too well: the need to escape.

  I push through the ever-expanding wall of people, moving as quickly as I can, hopping in the opposite direction past the people now filling the streets on word of the sad news. I run until my heart feels like a fist trying to punch through my chest. I stop on a corner far enough away to allow the sirens and screams to register only as a faint buzz. There is no one around. I am alone, and for the moment I feel relieved. I didn’t have to go through with it. I didn’t have to see the disappointment in his eyes, and he the shame in mine.

  I close my eyes, but I do not cry. I do not cry because I have already mourned. Why the execution? Don’t they know he’ll no longer be a man but a legend, a practically deified eternal symbol of self-sacrifice? Of course they do. After all of this, what bleary-eyed fool, intolerant of the world’s intolerances, would think himself worthy enough to fight against injustice? His death sentence began long ago—this was just the exclamation point. Savior, Sinner or Martyr, but never just a man—the sniper’s bullet was the deathblow to someone already suffering from the wounds of fragmentation.

  I open my eyes with their plot seared on my brain, and like the burning cross that night in the woods, I only see its brilliance.

  Eventually, I wander back to the motel. The fears of mob violence were misguided. The streets have succumbed to an eerie, defeated silence, yet the patrol cars continue their vigilant crawl.

  There is nothing but a whispering chorus of television sets transmitting the tragic news through cracked doors and open windows. Accompanying all of this is the sinister sound of metal scraping against stone.

  I look at the balcony above me. In between the open spaces of the railing and underneath room number 306 is an elderly Negro man, crouched and working feverishly at a spot on the walkway. His arm goes back and forth in a sawing motion, sending the sound of that horrible scraping into the night. He stops to mop his brow with the back of his hand and slowly stands up. His arthritic knees creak loudly. He holds a large putty knife in one hand and a mason jar filled with a dark liquid in the other. He looks at the jar and begins to cry. That is the spot where Martin last stood. His blood is in that jar. He leans over the railing, staring out into the dark. Nothing is out there. But then he sees me, and our eyes meet . . .

  1988

  A picture comes to me in my dreams, clear and unaltered. President Johnson sits at his wooden desk and signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He hands the pen to Martin, patting him on the back and shoulders as Martin leans in to add his signature as well. Martin looks toward the cameras almost stupefied, amazed, and definitely grateful, but there is an element of disbelief in his eyes.

  I try to place myself there, but it’s hard. When I do so, the image fades in and out, losing clarity. I can now trace this effect to the deep fear of being on the wrong side of history. We wish and hope for great change, but few of us actually expect it. That is what triggers Martin’s look of amazement—the shock that not all of us can see that change is inevitable. He knew that one day America would have to wrestle with itself to live up to its ideals and promises. He saw it. I did not. I am angry with myself for not having the vision or the faith to see it. I am angry for choosing the wrong side.

  As the status quo expanded, some of us wanted to sneak under the fence, including me. However, he had a greater vision: one of change, one of hope, a vision that I aligned myself with, out of pure pragmatism—a desire to hedge my bets. Maybe I was fearful of appearing cynical, but the foresight belonged to him, not to me. That vision, that courage—it fills me with shame to think of myself on his side. Now I see I was on their side—the side scared of change. Count, Mathis, Strobe—all of us are on the side scared of change, all of us desperate for inclusion, to receive that pat on the back from the establishment. It pains me to say it, but I feel I am part of an old breed of Negro that dreams inch by inch, while these new brothers and sisters dream in leaps and bounds.

  When I think of the movemen
t, it seems that the media has provided my memory. It’s the same black-and-white photos and footage of marches and beatings that everyone associates with the time. And to the disappointment of the occasionally interested young person, I offer no insight on the era beyond the superficial. Although the other ghosts have faded, there is one image that continues to haunt me.

  I still see that man on his knees, twenty years later. I have since read a book that a prominent historian had written about that time. Scholars consider it the preeminent account of that period: The King Years. (There are other works, but I never dared to read them, fearing what they told or didn’t.) I read the pages with careful interest, though pretending to be indifferent to whether or not my name might pop up in a paragraph. I got halfway through the dense text before going to the index and taking a look. I was there. But not in a chapter dedicated to exposing me, or a section intent on condemnation. Just a simple but troubling line buried in the voluminous notes:

  John Estem was an informant for the FBI. Agents recruited the young SCLC accountant to obtain information regarding the activities of King. This turned out to be a very expensive mistake. Estem was not a member of King’s trusted inner circle, and King barely knew him.