Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  I closed my eyes, both hands resting on my lap. Smith’s words in the car ran through my head, then the memory of trips my mother and I made to visit relatives in South Carolina when I was young fell through my heart like rain. I remembered roadside cafés like this diner, where we stopped hungry and tired after seven hours of driving and were told we could be served only if we went to the back entrance. Another image rose up: badly lit department stores near my relatives’ homes in Abbeville where they enjoyed the privilege of purchasing clothes like other citizens from the pale, blond salesgirls but could not try them on their bodies before the sale was made, as if their skin was unclean, corrupt in some way, and might contaminate or blemish with the ancient stain of blackness these cheap garments off the rack. All this my mother accepted, and she never corrected the teenage employees when they called her “girl,” which even then made my thoughts turn murderous with hate and humiliation, as an incident King experienced in 1944 brought him “perilous close” to despising white people when during his college days he was seated behind a curtain on a dining car, a shade pulled down to obliterate entirely the offensiveness of his presence. And so he rode behind a screen, trapped within their ideas of his identity, his blood pressure soaring, which meant even his health and the risk of myocardial infarction was at the mercy of people he despised, and he could do no more to change this than my mother who, dragging me in tow, tramped through mud around the café to the kitchen door, where we waited for what seemed hours, listening to the laughter and voices of customers and the clatter of dishes and silverware inside. I remembered that my mother’s expression was sad but stoic as she looked into the distance with her chin lifted, both hands folded in front of her, and I saw that for me she would suffer a thousand indignities and denials of her personhood so that I would not go hungry, dying this way every day, one little piece at a time, in order to wrest from the world not great victories but the most pathetically simple items for survival—hand-me-down clothes from the women whose houses she cleaned and the plate of food wrapped in foil the café’s waitress at last brought to us, handing it to my mother with a self-satisfied smile as if she’d done something good and noble that day, a compassionate deed her pastor would praise come Sunday, because she had not turned us away but instead fed the coloreds, the grendels, through the back door, not cast us out as some would, which was unchristian, but consigned us to a more benign phantom realm east of Eden where we were, if not fully human, half-men and half-women: poor, damned creatures scratching at her kitchen door like cats for a bowl of milk. (Wasn’t that how JFK had once described blacks, as “poor bastards”?) And for this meal, this phantom nourishment, my mother gave her money, said God bless you—I remember her blessing them—then back inside her car as we continued south she made me eat every morsel for which she had so dearly paid.

  Arlene placed our food on the counter, her lips compressed, as Smith came back from the bathroom, and rang up the bill. “That’s four dollars and fifty cents.”

  I handed her a five-dollar bill. She placed it in the cash register, then scooped out my change. I thrust my palm toward her for the coins, and had perfect control of myself, the magnanimity and external calm my mother had insisted upon, and which the Movement’s leaders so nobly embodied, until she slapped the money on the counter, and something inside me (I don’t know what) snapped (I don’t know how), flooding me with a hatred so hot, like a drug, I was nearly blinded by it as I threw the food in her face, hurled from the counter sugar canisters and ketchup bottles smashing against the wall behind the grill, screaming so loud and long my glasses steamed; then, as Arlene fled toward the rear of the diner, I stormed outside to the car, Smith right at my heels.

  He was grinning. “Very nice. You were vicious, Bishop. I think your best line was calling her an insignificant, execrable bitch mired in the booboisie—that’s from Mencken, right?”

  “I said that?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he cackled. “And more. You left her toasted, roasted, and with an apple in her mouth. It was choice. You sounded like William F. Buckley on bad acid. I always knew it’d be sweet to see a black intellectual go ballistic.”

  I was shaking too badly to drive. And I felt ashamed, as if I’d failed the minister, my mother, myself. I gave Smith my keys—his smile mashed his cheeks up in parallel moons—and within a few minutes we were back on the highway, heading farther south. For the longest time I sat with my hands squeezed between my knees, my fists clenched, afraid that at any moment I’d see in the rearview mirror a highway patrol car pulling up behind us, yet I felt exhilarated by what I’d done.

  Smith kept grinning at me, happily patting out rhythms on the steering wheel with his palms. “You all right.” He reached over and patted my shoulder. “With a li’l more work, you gonna love it where I live.”

  4

  There were many times when he wondered if he was wrong.

  Sitting by the window in the second row of first-class seats, all the others empty at this hour, on the predawn flight that shuttled him back and forth between Chicago and Atlanta, where he was determined to earn his $6,000-a-year salary by delivering a sermon each Sunday, he thought back to the astonishing victories granted him by the Lord of Love, and forward to the November retreat planned for his staff at which time he felt he should remind them how he was still searching and did not have all the answers. Nonviolence, he felt, was an experiment with truth. It was a truth-seeking process. That was all in this world he could say with certainty …

  It was four-thirty in the morning. The engines of the airplane roared around him as it tore down the runway, shaking loose poorly secured doors on the overhead compartments and, behind him, throwing dishes to the floor in the tiny cubicle that served as a galley. That so much metal could even leave the ground and stay airborne always startled and delighted him (and in single-engine planes, in which he refused to ride, terrified him). Airplanes piqued his anagogic and analogical side, the old student of Aquinas who enjoyed reasoning vertically from the natural world toward heaven, which these flying machines came close to bumping into. Unconsciously he pressed his feet forward under the seat in front of him to keep his small black suitcase from sliding into the aisle, though if it spilled open there would be little to retrieve because he felt best when he traveled light with as little baggage as possible, physical and metaphysical. Toward the front of the plane, beneath the red FASTEN SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING signs, the black stewardess who’d brought coffee and a pillow and fussed over him when he boarded was strapping herself into a bucket seat that folded out of the wall. She’d told him her name was Stephanie. An Alabaman raised to value the goodwill and hospitality that was so much a part of his own upbringing, she’d asked for his autograph and couldn’t do enough for him. Apparently, she’d seen his name on the passenger list, then rushed out and purchased forty copies of Stride Toward Freedom, inserting in each one the inscription she wanted him to write for her family and friends. “I hope you won’t mind,” she’d said. He saw the cardboard box of books at her feet, and sighed. All he wanted to do was work on his sermon and nap before they arrived in Atlanta. She couldn’t know how sensitive he was about people fawning over him, or how every worldly honor he received (he had more medals than a Russian general) threw him into the deepest reflection on whether he deserved these distinctions and if one day they’d prove to be more weight than they were worth. Glorifying any man was a sin. But he accepted the honors so as not to offend. People sent him photos of their newborns named after him, their wedding snapshots, and constantly wrote him requests for his autographed portrait. Always he or someone on his staff responded. After his trip to India he’d vowed to set aside one day a week for fasting and meditation, and to spend more time in study—he was certain he needed these things to be a better leader. Yet there never seemed to be enough time to keep those vows … Their eyes caught across the cabin. Stephanie was smiling at him again, then she winked and looked back at the clipboard on her lap.

  Suddenly
he felt warm. With two fingers he pulled loose the tight knot of his tie, undid the top button on his shirt, then pushed up the window’s stiff curtain at his right, peering down at blinking lights on the plane’s silvery deltoid wing, and beyond that to the waters of Lake Michigan. The sun, huge and liquid, hung over the horizon. From this height waves wimpling the blue surface looked frozen, as if someone had called time out on all motion in the world below, and the Wheel of Life stopped to give everyone time to catch his breath. And then he could see nothing as the plane began its steep ascent to thirty-five thousand feet—he only knew they were rising to that altitude because the pilot, a southerner by his accent, came on over the crackling loudspeaker to tell passengers his flight plan and the temperature in Atlanta and to report that their crew had a combined total of fifty thousand hours in the air. Somehow the pilot’s voice and experience put him at ease. Or maybe it was the vulnerability he felt whenever he flew, knowing that someone he couldn’t see or talk to had control over his destination and whether he lived or died, and most likely that person was trustworthy since his own life depended on doing his job well. It wasn’t easy to be an atheist on an airplane. No sooner had you strapped in than you had to believe in something beyond yourself. Perhaps there was a sermon here, an exemplum he might use on Sunday. But no, afterward someone would pick it apart, like the monk Gaunilo shredding Anselm’s proof for God’s existence. It was too whimsical. Yet in a small way it reminded him of that terrible night in Montgomery when his faith, lukewarm since childhood, became real.

  Everyone in Atlanta expected the son of the city’s most influential pastor would be eager to join the church. The truth was that when he was seven, doing so was the farthest thing from his mind. But during Ebenezer’s annual two-week revival in May of 1936, his sister boldly stepped forward for baptism, and this stung him sorely, the thought that Christine might get a leg up on him in anything. Halfheartedly he submitted to the ritual. But even then some critical, questioning part of him stood back, skeptical, watching himself from a distance, and mocking him a little because not only had the “crisis moment” associated with conversion eluded him but he could not square the over-the-top emotionalism of the fundamentalist Baptist church—talking in tongues and flailing on the floor when “getting happy”—with his preference for coolly and deliberately thinking things through.

  Sometimes he felt at odds with others at Ebenezer. His Sunday-school teachers had little education to speak of. Nevertheless, they believed. Although none had heard of biblical hermeneutics, each old deacon and assistant pastor had been saved in that revered and awful (to him) moment of epilepsy and seizure so many said lay in wait one day for him. He told no one how that prediction cut him off at the knees after he saw a light-skinned girl from Booker T. Washington High School, one he’d been attracted to, struck down by the spirit in his father’s church. Lightning seemed to single her out from the other parishioners fanning themselves and singing one of his favorite hymns, “Honor, Honor”—she was adance in the seat beside her startled mother, then it lifted her like a broken doll and flung her helplessly to the hard wooden floor. Her eyes turned up in her head. Veins in her throat stood out. There was the possibility she might swallow her tongue, and that frightened him all the more and made his heart leap in his chest. He watched her wide-eyed, squeezing his hands together, as she kicked the air and tore loose her clothing, as unconscious of her nakedness as someone in one of the ancient, pre-Christian mystery cults. For months she’d ignored him. She’d been haughty, distant, in control. Now she writhed on the floor like a worm. Water ran down her legs. Her light cotton dress rose above her brown thighs, giving him an eyeful of what he’d fantasized about all summer long before the girl’s mother shoved her garments down. His own mother spun him back around in his seat. Watching the girl had aroused him. Biting down hard on his knuckles, he felt burning shame shot through with the wound of desire. Spiritual hunger and sexual longing simultaneously. He closed his eyes, praying that his voyeurism, like that of Ham, had not offended the god thunderously unleashed inside the girl, yet if this violent seizure was what it meant to be saved, he hoped it would never happen to him.

  He wondered if his faith was weak, if perhaps he was the worst of sinners and hypocrites. Others, he felt, suspected this too when at thirteen he shocked his teacher and classmates by rejecting the idea of Christ’s bodily resurrection from the sepulcher. He questioned, he doubted the Bible’s literal interpretation all through his teens, and wondered if the Negro church would ever be more Apollonian, as intellectually respectable as it was Dionysian and emotionally intense. The conflict between the intellect and emotional fervor, between the head (gnosis) and the heart (pistis), only deepened as he grew older. It held him back from following in his father’s footsteps. Medicine or law, he thought, might suit him better than churches that often seemed so otherworldly they were no earthly good at all. Preparing men for heaven was all well and good. But, he wondered, what of their conditions in the here and now? Then at Morehouse his liberal professors George D. Kelsey and Benjamin Mays gave him scholarly models for the kind of minister he one day hoped to be, filling his head with literature and philosophy, but even a jackleg preacher incapable of writing his own name had direct knowledge of the peace that passeth understanding he had only experienced in books.

  During the Montgomery campaign, that ended. Threats on his life and those of Coretta and Yolanda, whom he saw too seldom at the height of the bus boycott, were nothing new. But one call shook him. It caught him, this newly minted Ph.D. whose future seemed so bright before the boycott’s leadership was thrust upon him, one weary night when he came home feeling euchred and afraid his family might be snatched away. His wife was waiting by the telephone. She handed it to him. “Listen, nigger,” the gin-soaked voice said, “we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery. If you aren’t out of this town in three days we’re gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house.”

  He knew he could not go on. The forces gathered against him were too many and great. Out there in the night someone was loading a 20-gauge pump-action shotgun to hunt him down; pouring gasoline into a glass jug to blow the limbs off his baby. They might be with the police. Or the military. Or Negroes displeased with all he’d stirred up. He could turn to no one for help. Not the Montgomery police, the politicians in Washington, or his parents. No one. Here, the roots of segregation ran deep, fueled by poverty. The seventy thousand whites on the average earned $1,730 yearly, the fifty thousand Negroes $970. Fewer than two thousand of the voting-age Negroes were registered, and humiliating obstacles were placed in their way. In Montgomery no Negroes held public office. The uneducated were apathetic, resigned to second-class status. The learned, especially if they belonged to any of the black civic groups, were factionalized and fought more often than they agreed.

  For a long time that night he walked the floor, thinking of Revelations 22:15, his head tipped, both hands clenched into fists, his stomach turned to lead, searching for some way to escape his duties on the Montgomery Improvement Association without looking like a coward or a fool. Once his foot struck the leg of a table and brought a lamp and a photo of the baby bouncing onto the carpet. He swore under his breath and undid the mess he’d made. His directionless pacing brought him into the kitchen—he could do less damage there. In order to find something to do with his trembling hands, he put a fresh pot of coffee on the stove, silently watched it brew, then slumped down with his cup at the kitchen table. Coretta was rooms away, caring for the baby. He rubbed his face with both hands. He began to heave for breath, knowing if he failed in this fight against evil, surely the others who’d sacrificed so much would falter as well. His name would be struck from the Book of Life; the boycott would unravel and nothing would have been accomplished. They would be worse off than before. Demoralized, defeated. But in heaven’s name, what man could continue under this weight? He felt caged. Chained. In bondage and no longer belo
nging to himself. How had Boston University’s rising star come to this cul-de-sac? From childhood and the days his father talked politics at the dinner table, he’d dreamed of uplifting the Race, studied and prepared himself for this great task, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith only to discover, too late, that nobody—or so he feared—gave a goddamn about his bourgeois sacrifices. If Yolanda and Coretta were killed, who would care? If there was no God, as so many thinkers claimed, he was a fool for endangering his family. Love was the ontological foundation of values. God was love. It followed that without Him there could be no basis for all his appeals to justice from the pulpit. No reason for anyone to care about the poor. No argument, in the end, to counter slavery itself, for in a materialistic, mechanistic world, a neutral universe onto which man projected his delusions of freedom and inherent worth, no value claims could be made at all—the cosmos would be irrational, not benign, indifferent to order and measure, a nightmare in the mind of some devil who could not roll himself awake. Thus far Montgomery had shown him that if God was not dead, He must certainly be deaf to His people’s suffering.