Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  Half an hour earlier, I’d picked her up outside the office for Operation Breadbasket. She stepped from the building in a group of chattering black women, but I singled her out instantly—my heart trembled ever so slightly, picking up speed—as did other black men on the street, for Amy, with her bee-stung lips and eyes full of laughter, was so striking that it wasn’t uncommon for brothers to drive their cars right up on the curb to hit on her. She was wearing a simple, beltless blue dress that clung nicely to all her corners and, smiling, handed me a map scrawled on office stationery. I was, of course, tongue-tied during the thirty-minute drive to the library, and just listened as she described her new job, her co-workers, and how enticingly they’d talked about the Liberation Library. To be honest, I’d hoped for a kiss when she got in the car, a chaste peck on the cheek, a hug, or something. Try as I might, I was unable to read her feelings about me. Nor was I reading myself very well that afternoon (We always lose), all of which made me gloomy as I guided the car through rush-hour traffic. There was so much I wanted to say, but I left my thoughts unvoiced, despite my feeling that Amy was always watching me, waiting for me to disappoint her in one of the dozens of ways brothers she’d dated had done before; I always felt she was testing me, and even though we were alone in my car I sensed a chorus line of her erstwhile boyfriends at my elbow, all those black men who’d failed at being faithful, strong, committed to her, aware of her needs; and with my every action I sensed, rightly or wrongly, that I was guilty of their mistakes until I proved otherwise. Only a black American woman could place that burden on a man. Yet it wasn’t simply about her. Or me. No, it was all that painful history behind us, the centuries of black men and women hurting and betraying and possibly hating each other since the days of slavery when a Negro risked death if he defended his family; the damage wrought by centuries of discrimination was always there, right at the heart of something as private as passion, despite pleas for forgiveness and promises to forget the past and make a fresh start. It was about my mother Ellesteen’s bitterness toward my father, that pathetic bastard, after he took off and left her to raise me alone. Oh yes, all that was in the car between us, unspoken and perhaps unspeakable, and I hadn’t the faintest idea in such an uncertain world how we could begin.

  “Matthew,’ she said, reeling me back from remembrance, “I think they’re starting.”

  White visitors drifted outside, obviously bored by the Liberation Library’s familiar titles. Once the last white person stepped to the street, the young woman at the table stood up and latched the door, locking in the eight blacks who remained. She walked to a section of the bookshelves, reached behind a row of works by Chester Himes—I heard a click—and that section of the shelf swung open into the outer room, as grandfather clocks do in old British movies set in haunted houses. I made an in-suck of breath, as startled as the other black visitors, for behind the tiny room in which we’d waited, there was a larger space, with huge colored maps of every major city in America on the walls, and five rows of folding chairs before a podium.

  Yahya Zubena welcomed us inside.

  “Matthew,” Amy whispered, “this isn’t what I expected at all. Isn’t he supposed to be in jail?”

  “I read in Jet that he got out last year.”

  “No one at work told me this was his library.”

  Her reaction to him was visceral, the recoil any woman might feel in the presence of a man who, after his prison conversion, confessed in his books that he raped blacks as “practice,” as a warm-up to perfect his technique for whites in the suburbs. But we couldn’t leave. We were locked inside. I had to nudge Amy between her shoulder blades to coax her into entering the back room, but I was so dazed myself I don’t exactly remember walking in, only that Yahya said, “Now that the ofays are gone, we can get down to business.” He ordered us to follow him to a map of Chicago at our left. By any measure, he was a big man—linebacker big—with a Farmer Burns build, full-bearded, and a complexion one shade up from sepia. He wore faded jeans, work boots, and a dashiki of red, black, and green, the colors of Marcus Garvey’s flag. As large as he was, Yahya made the back room’s sparse furnishings feel as flimsy as constructions of pasteboard and papiermâché. In a word, he was one of the darlings of the white media, one of King’s competitors for press coverage, and every parole officer’s worst nightmare.

  “Brothers and sisters,” intoned Yahya, “I want y’all to look at that map and tell me whereabouts you live.”

  We all did so, indicating addresses in south and west Chicago. That pleased Yahya. He steered our group toward the map of Detroit. “If y’all got relatives there, show me where they live.” A few people pointed toward the heavily industrial portions of the city. Again Yahya smiled. He moved us on from map to map, from Oakland to Harlem, Cleveland to Philadelphia, and each time he asked, “Where do most black people live?” The answer unfailingly was in some urban district near factories and commerce.

  “Now, I want y’all to sit down and listen carefully.” He waited until we were all seated on the folding chairs. “I took you through those maps because I wanted you to see for yourself that it ain’t no accident where we live forms a pattern. A concentration camp. We’ve always near highways or factories or warehouses or railroad tracks. Ain’t that so? You might say we’re contained. We’re concentrated in the areas where the Man wants us—away from him. Segregation did that, but from a strategic standpoint it did something else. What you think that is?” Fingers in his beard, he paced, sometimes pausing to stand directly over visitors in the front row where Amy and I sat, looming over us with his face only inches from ours. “I’ma tell you. Being concentrated like that means when y’all start rebelling against your miserable conditions, tearing up the city like you did a year ago, all Charlie’s got to do is move his tanks and trucks and National Guard troops right down the freeways and Illinois Central tracks to your front door.”

  “Excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “What about blacks who don’t live there? Aren’t we a little more dispersed than these maps show?”

  “I don’t think so, brother. Maybe you better look again, or clean them Coke-bottle glasses of yours.”

  A couple behind Amy and me chuckled. The skin on my face tingled. “I was just asking if—”

  Yahya scowled me into silence.

  There was a pleat between Amy’s brows. “Why are you telling us this?”

  “So you can prepare, sistuh.”

  “For what?”

  Yahya stepped toward her, so close we could smell him; he forced her to look up at him. I felt Amy stiffen. She placed her right hand on top of mine. “Why you think, girl? For the coming race war.”

  “I don’t believe there is one coming, not if people of goodwill, white and black, do everything they can to make things better. Until a little while ago, I worked with Dr. King. Right now I work at Operation Breadbasket—”

  Yahya grinned. “For King, huh? I guess we got some Uncle Tom nigguhs here. When the Revolution comes, y’all got to go.”

  Now Amy was trembling. “You’d kill other black people?”

  “Sistuh, I hate to say this, but you’n and that brother sound like house niggers to me. I don’t think you understand anything about the necessity of revolutionary violence. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me finish talking to the real black people in this room.”

  Amy squeezed my hand so tightly I feared she might break the bones in my fingers. Witheringly, she gave me a sad, sideways look, as if to say, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I leaned back on my chair, wanting to leave but knowing we were Yahya Zubena’s captives until he finished. Against my will, I listened while he instructed the others on what to do when the white man came to get them, as Nazis had rounded up Jews in Poland thirty years before. Come they would, said Yahya. It was only a matter of time because blacks were asking for too much too quickly. “I’m telling y’all, the white man would rather blow it all up rather than give it up!” The evidence for this, he explained, was in the hi
story books, where any fool could see that Caucasians were driven to conquest and oppression because they were “ice people” who came from cold European climates and subjugated ancient, peace-loving “sun people” everywhere in Africa. (Was I imagining this, or hadn’t the minister once said, “The Negro knows nothing of Africa, he is an American”?) He droned on and on, his descriptions of whites as Cainites and coloreds as Abelites fascinating to me, given the book I’d read on the train, and I thought of Chaym as he outlined his airtight, one-dimensional interpretation of history, one in which there was no room for ambiguity, or for counterexamples to his arguments, or for people like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or even Jackie Robinson. His historical vision was kitsch. Revolutionary kitsch. The way he reasoned, with racial politics as every syllogism’s major premise, led all his thoughts to the same terminus. (Of course, if the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s likely you’ll treat every problem—and person—as a nail.) I doubted his comparison of black communities to concentration camps, and his claim that Negroes could never be racist because, as Yahya said, “You can’t be racist unless you have power. Black folks don’t have power, so we can’t be racist.” It was the logic of Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” and there in the Black People’s Liberation Library, I felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a Wonderland where all the world’s meanings were reversed. Yahya reminded me of the militant black students I met at Columbia College, dashiki-wearing radicals who, after I’d contradicted one of them at a meeting of the Black Student Union, told me I wasn’t black enough to belong to their group. They cast me out of their meetings. In response, I formed, then briefly led, the first Bible study group on campus for a year before my faith in the god of the Book began to fade. They (and Yahya) made me recall King, who warned, “There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored and anything noncolored is condemned.” And even more importantly, “We shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect.”

  By the time Yahya finished, Amy looked ill. Noticing this, Yahya cut his eyes our way. “I don’t suppose you two agree with me, do you?”

  Her words were hardly above a hiss. “I’ve seen good white people who sacrificed their lives on Freedom Rides.

  Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed and buried under a Mississippi dam right beside James Chaney.”

  “Uh-hunh, I heard about that. It’s sad, sistuh, but the way I see it, your average white boy won’t go that far. Some of ’em might fight for colored folks when they’re young and rebelling against their elders, but sooner or later they get that wake-up call from their own people, who pull their coat to the fact that it’s their privileged future they’re foolin’ with, and if they keep acting up, they won’t be on top no more. What that means is they gonna cut their hair, clean themselves up, and put on a three-piece suit with a pair of red suspenders, and shake off the woolly-headed woogies they been hanging out with. Naw, honey, white boys always make sure they got it better than us.”

  “And you believe that?” she asked. “Are you saying Dr. King’s life is poorer—as a life—than Richard Speck’s?”

  “Speck’s white, ain’t he?”

  With that, Amy stood up. “Can we leave now, please?”

  “Maybe you’d better,” said Yahya.

  Back in the car, she was too exasperated to speak as we pulled away. Finally she brought out, “I’m sorry, Matthew! I would never have taken you there if I’d known what it was about.”

  “You don’t have to apologize—”

  “Yes, I do! I suppose when he takes over, he’ll drive people like you and me into the gas chambers. Mama Pearl always told me that anybody who tried to get me to hate was my enemy.” Leaning back on the seat, she took a long breath. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “I’ve dated guys who talked like him. Can you believe that? They’re the reason I wasn’t seeing anybody when we met. I mean, I’d given up. All that hate for the white man turned so quickly—if I disagreed with them—into some of them slapping me hard enough to shake loose my teeth. Or they’d use that excuse about the Man holding them down as the reason why they couldn’t keep a job and expected me to support them—and their drug habits! I was just sick of it, that’s all.” Amy paused, looking me up and down as I pulled to a stop at an intersection. “There’s no hate in you, Matthew. I like that. I trust that. And I’m glad you got rid of that silly pencil-holder.”

  “Do … do you want to get something to eat?”

  “No, I’m not hungry. Just take me home, okay?”

  She’d found a new apartment, this one located on the corner of Dearborn and Huron. After I parked, Amy asked, “Would you like to come up for a drink or something?” I said yes. (I was less interested in the drink than in the “something.”) I followed her up one flight to a door it took her forever to unlock (there were four padlocks and latches on it). Once inside, I saw that sixty dollars a month bought her an efficiency apartment divided into a living room, a kitchen, and a minuscule bath. Her front room was furnished ceiling to floor with bookshelves (I noticed titles I’d given her by Jean Toomer and Claude McKay when we were in college, ones in which I’d playfully signed the authors’ names and written glowing praise for her), and tables and chairs made from driftwood. The floors were bare. A fisherman’s net swung from the ceiling. On the wall over her sofabed were black-and-white movie (Stormy Weather) and theater (A Raisin in the Sun) posters. Amy tossed her purse onto a chair, flipped through her album collection quickly, and put John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on her stereo. On the kitchen counter she lit a stick of pine incense; then she popped open the refrigerator and filled two wineglasses with pinot noir.

  Twilight was coming on, thickening throughout her rooms, spreading inside the apartment like a tone, a touch of the keys on the far left side of a piano, like a stain of teal-blue watercolor that caught along the surface of the wineglass she handed me and reflected off her windows. A whiff of twilight even tinctured shadows in the corners: a base color lying beneath all others as streetlights below us on Dearborn winked on and night’s density gathered in her curtains and—yes—in my mind, because I couldn’t believe I was standing there, sipping wine that flew right to my head, and Amy was kicking off her shoes and looking at me in the way I’d imagined only in my dreams.

  “After tonight I feel … soiled. I think I need to take a shower.”

  “Oh …” I stammered. “Go ahead, I’ll wait out here.”

  “I was hoping, Matthew, you’d take it with me.”

  Straightaway, she disrobed, leaving her blue dress and white undergarments on the floor, and walked—I want to say floated—toward her bathroom. Believing I was dead or dreaming, I pinched my arm. Ouch. Then I heard water spurting a room away. I shed my own clothes as quickly as I could, hurried barefoot to the bathroom, and found Amy soaping her shoulders in billowing clouds of steam. I squeezed into the small cubicle with her. Instantly my glasses began to fog. Very gently she lifted them off my face, pressed her lips against mine, then handed me the bar of Lifebuoy. With it I lathered my hands, and as she closed her eyes, lifting her head a little, my fingers traced her forehead and cheeks, then moved down, soaping every crevice and swale, and it was as if I was sculpting her the way Pygmalion did his masterpiece, slowly discovering every muscle and fold, as I massaged from Amy’s chin to her calves, and then she did the same for me, lathering places where I didn’t know I even had places, and then we toweled each other dry, both of us a little drunk by then from touching and pinot noir, and dropped onto her bed, and I said, Tell me what you want me to do, which she did, and for the next two hours—or perhaps it was three—I did everything Amy wanted, in just the way she wanted it, for I do pride myself on my work, whatever it is.

  “Well,” she said when we were done, “I guess it’s true.”

  I was groggy, squinting at her electric alarm clock: 11:30. “What’s true?”


  “Still waters run deep.”

  I was trying to figure out what she meant by that when the telephone on a table beside her bed rang. Amy picked it up, pressed it against her ear, and said, “’Lo?” As she listened, her face changed. She said, “Chaym, is that you?” Moments later the phone was dead. Amy placed it back on its base, her expression that of bewilderment.