Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  “Matthew … something’s wrong.”

  “That was Chaym? How did he get your number?”

  “The same way you did. The phone book. He must have called me from that filling station in town—”

  “What did he say?”

  She swung her feet over the side of the bed, pulled on an old housecoat, and sat away from me on a chair, squeezing her hands, her knees pressed together. “I don’t know what he was talking about! Something about … a green Plymouth, people watching him. Did you see a car like that?”

  I had, but I said nothing.

  “I’m worried. I think you should see if he’s okay.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now!” she said. “We made Dr. King a promise.”

  “That’s a six-hour drive! We were just beginning to—”

  “I’ll be here when you get back. Do you love me?”

  “How can you even ask?”

  She stepped back to the bed. I lifted my left arm, and she slid in close, her head on my shoulder and her hand on my chest. “Then you’ll do it for me, right?” Leaving her was the last thing I wanted to do, and at that moment I hated Smith. But being me, I remembered words I’d taped long ago on my refrigerator door: Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love, would faint and lie down. Thomas à Kempis. Of course, he was never asked to leave the bed of a woman who looked better than a batch of Miss Gurdey Maye’s buttermilk biscuits.

  The sacrifices I made for the Movement …

  “Matthew?”

  “Okay, I’m going.”

  By late afternoon, I was back in Makanda, cursing Smith as I climbed the steps to the farmhouse. He was nowhere to be seen, so I drove to Rev. Littlewood’s church, wondering if something evil had befallen him, which is what I’d deliciously imagined during the long drive, but now I was worried and feeling guilty that I’d left him when so many people wanted King dead and might mistake Smith for the minister. It was a Friday. The church was vacant. I used one of the keys Rev. Littlewood had given us when we started work on Bethel to let myself in. I looked to no avail for Smith but noticed something else. Portions of the church dated from different periods, like a palimpsest, reaching back to the end of the Civil War when black couples separated by slavery held mass weddings on this very site, as many as a hundred men and women gathering to exchange wedding vows and have their long-deferred unions sanctified and cemented by the Christian faith.

  The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, the African, the Roman, the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experience of the spirit. On either side of the entrance were two cracked stained-glass windows of intersecting tracery, the mullions of each branching out into curved bars, below them smooth masonry with chamfered edges. Under the direction of the church’s first pastor, the congregation finished the church’s foyer and stairs leading up to the sanctuary, but it fell to the next generation to complete the choir stand and the storeroom where wooden crates containing the church’s archives—tithings, mimeograph copies of a weekly newsletter, and records on christenings, funerals, and donations—were stacked almost to the ceiling; then it fell to a third generation to raise additional rooms in the rear for special meetings. In the original braces strengthening the frame of the roof, in the quoins at the church’s four corners, in the small choir section to the left of the pulpit, added during the 1920s by parishioners whose names were now lost, I saw a creation that on every level—from purlins to wallplates—transcended the passing of its founders, one that no single generation could live to see completed and thus was handed down and on to those yet unborn for its continual restoration and completion.

  From this ground of blended anonymous lives, many a world-acclaimed king might arise.

  Where I fit into this sanctuary so heavy with black history, I could not say. Before returning to Chicago I’d simply fit myself behind a wheelbarrow, hauling away debris as Smith cleaned and polished the pews, doing and redoing the architrave and shutting stile with a painstaking care I found as hard to fathom as his spontaneous act of volunteering first as a caretaker, then helping to finish the additions left undone, and at last, just as I was leaving, offering to teach one of the Sunday-school classes for Rev. Littlewood, explaining Old Testament stories to Bethel’s wide-eyed children with the skill that only a natural thespian could bring. He told me he planned to act out the tales, taking the parts of Noah and Job and others; he especially enjoyed the opportunity to play a fickle Jehovah with a cruel streak in Him. I knew—just knew—the children would love it. I imagined them cheering during his classes. He even talked about possibly directing the children in biblical plays of their own. But, I wondered, why this sacrifice for a community in which he believed himself an outcast?

  The answer and Chaym were waiting for me in the church’s storeroom. I found him cleaning up after a day of painting, for which he was miserably paid, scrubbing turpentine-soaked rags on his trousers, shirt, and portions of his face splattered with Optic White. Looking up, he saw me and winked.

  I asked, “You like what you see?”

  “Hey now, that’s my line, Bishop. You get your own. But, yeah, I do like what I see. That big Cheshire cat grin means you musta got some trim in Chicago. That’s good. Keep at it, and those pimples on your face might clear up.”

  “Watch how you talk about Amy. I was there when you called her. The only reason I’m back here so soon is because she was worried about you.”

  “About me? Worried, eh?”

  “Yes, I know it sounds strange—”

  “Hell, I’m all right. I just got my hands on a li’l gorilla dust last night and thought I saw somethin’ outside. Wasn’t nobody there when I looked again. But I’m straight today, and I am glad to see your ass. You can help me move some of these paint cans upstairs.”

  “Uh-uh, no! I’ve done enough work here, and I don’t know why you’re doing it. Did you get religion or something after you got shot?”

  “Naw, Bishop,” he said as he leaned back, resting his arms on the bench. “I don’t believe in a blessed thing, including me. I’ll never be one of the faithful. It’s just that I figure work is all I got to offer, even if the ground we till gives back nothing. It don’t matter. I ain’t worried ’bout it bein’ fair. For a li’l while what I do here is just what I’m doin’ and, who knows, it may be beautiful, and maybe nobody won’t know ’bout it, even God, but for a second or two it’ll make a few of the folks who come through here on Sunday happy. I don’t ’spect much more’n that anymore.” He stared as I rubbed my lower back. “What’s the matter? You feel stiff?”

  “Some. I just drove for over six hours. Remember?”

  “Got just the thing for you. Come with me.”

  Smith led me from the storeroom to the platform on which Rev. Littlewood’s pulpit sat. He pushed it back to widen the space where we stood, then spread his feet shoulder width. Closed his eyes. Tucked in his tail, slowly raised his arms chest high, and said, “Do like I’m doing. Keep it slow. Don’t stop. Just flow.”

  “I’ve seen this on TV. All those Chinese you see in the park every morning in Peking do this, right?”

  “Wrong.” He kept moving, flowing through postures, his weight never equally distributed on both feet. “What they’re doing is a lie, like most things. The Communists under Mao have outlawed all the old, traditional martial arts ’cause they can’t control them, or the genius of those venerable old kung fu masters. But people are practicin’ in secret anyway. So the government concocted the form you seen on TV so the practitioners would have to do it out in the open at the parks—
where the government can watch the herd and take names—since that form requires lots of room. What I’m showing you is the real thing done by monks at the Shaolin monastery. You can do it in a shower stall if you adjust your footwork. It don’t take up no more room than that. When you do it, do it riabroi.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, sorry. That’s a Thai word. There’s no English equivalent. I picked it up in Chiang Mai. It’s yours. I’ma give it to you. Riabroi means everything together at once, complete, sensible, beautiful, perfect, and natural. You do this form—or anythin’ else—riabroi and you won’t need me lookin’ after you no more.”

  “Looking after me? I’m the one Doc told to—”

  “Bishop, shut up and do the form.”

  I followed his lead, letting him teach me the twenty-four moves of the (Yang) Tai Chi Chuan form he’d picked up while traveling overseas, making myself slow down more with each posture, each breath, wasting no motion whatsoever, and as I mimicked his movements I began to feel lighter and less fatigued—like water, like wind—though I’m sure if Rev. Littlewood had entered Bethel AME just then, he would have found it puzzling to see two black men, both refugees of the American race wars, doing Taoist-drenched Tai Chi in the Christian sanctuary where generations of right and proper Griffiths had prayed to a god unknown to either Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu.

  On our way back to the Nest that evening my anger at him for making me leave Amy was, strange to say, replaced by an ineffable peace. “Do that form three times in a row every day,” he advised, “and you’ll live longer than that colored ex-cowboy in Texas named Charlie Smith I was reading about.” His promise of longevity made me laugh, but I agreed to do as he asked, for had he not proven himself to be, despite his crabbiness and infuriating eccentricities, an experienced guide for those of us, broken-winged, condemned to mediocrity and the margins of the world? All during the ride back I felt this fraternity with him, but I had no idea I was not alone in my admiration.

  As I pulled up the road I saw the green Plymouth parked near the farmhouse and two travel-stained men sitting on our porch as if they owned it.

  “Watch yourself,” said Smith. “Let me handle this.”

  The older of the two men, gourd-shaped with dull egg-blue eyes behind his thick glasses, his tie tucked under his belt, stood up as we got out of the car and came up the foot-path, scratching the side of his head where he needed a shave. He took off his hat. The movement exposed for a second the shoulder holster inside his wrinkled suitcoat and the butt of a snub-nosed .38.

  “Evening, Chaym,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  I stayed to one side of Smith, my palms beginning to perspire.

  “Evening yourself. You fellahs lost?” Smith’s eyes burned into them. “You’re pretty far off the main road—”

  “No, this is where we want to be. My name is Jasper Groat and”—he made a twitchlike nod—“my colleague there is Vincent Withersby. We—say, do you think we could talk inside for a little while?”

  “Depends on what you want, Mr. Groat.”

  “Oh.” Groat laughed and dipped inside his coat; then his palm displayed a shiny, official-looking badge pinned to his wallet. “That’s simple. We want to talk. To offer you a way to make a little money and maybe help your country out during difficult times. That sound good to you? I certainly hope it does. The people we work for are very … interested … in Martin Luther King. Our director thinks your success impersonating King could, urn, be … useful … for one of the projects we’ve been kicking around the office for a coupla years. Couldn’t find the missing piece, though, till you showed up. Damn, you do look like him, you know? Even behind those dark glasses and that beard. You think we might rest a spell inside, put our feet up, and chat awhile?”

  To his left, Withersby was packing enough Dunhill tobacco into his Liverpool pipe to last for an hour. Regardless of what we said, they planned to stay So I slid open the screen door, stepped to one side, and bid them enter.

  10

  On the floor of their living room in Atlanta, with the rugs rolled back into a corner and furniture pushed to one side, he was wrestling with his children, pinning Dexter’s arms while Marty, one arm around his neck, rode his hack in an effort to topple him so both boys could get the upper hand. Away to the left in his workroom the phone rang and rang. His wife looked on from the hallway, shaking her head. Can’t you find somewhere else to play with these kids? The tussle, which had gone on for ten minutes of giggling and tickling, was the first good wrestling bout he’d had with the children since they left Chicago; in fact, it was the first time they’d had his undivided attention in weeks, so he was hardly about to stop.

  They were happy to he home again, the wretched flat on South Hamlin just a horrible memory now, a place that all summer long drained the gaiety from his children and epressed his wife. No, moving them there was what the Movement required at the time, hut he swore he would never. God willing, subject them to that sort of hardship again. If he regretted anything about his life, it was the way the Cause took such a devastating toll on his personal life and the roles he cherished the most, those of father and husband. Every so often he felt tempted to call his schedule suicide on the installment plan. The crowds and faces ran together. On so many mornings he awoke in a different hotel in a strange city, and for a few bewildering moments he sat up in bed wondering where on earth he might be. And the meals his admirers served him? How they played hob with his waistline! He remembered one in particular—the food itself, not the occasion or his hosts. There was a hundred-year-old bottle from Oporto, lobster on Canton china as thin as a wafer, frittura mista, and pale game served so ingeniously, so artfully, it looked as though each slice had been cut from butter. Yet, if the truth be known, he preferred catfish, pigs’ feet, and collard greens. At least at home now he could relax for a little while and eat whatever he pleased. And, thank God, he didnt have to shave. Daily use of the lye-based depilatory powder his sensitive skin required often left his face tender, smarting and feeling raw, stinging in the outdoor air. But now that they were back in Atlanta, he knew his tortured skin would have a few days to heal.

  His children were calling, beckoning him back from his workroom, where he’d finally hurried to answer the phone, to the living room and the makeshift handball court they’d created by pushing back furniture and rolling up the rug. His work space was on the same floor, a back room where his gray metal desk was barricaded in by a file cabinet, a confusion of boxes, shelves loaded down with books, his notes for Where Do We Go from Here?, mounds of correspondence, and the phone he held burning against his ear. His hands began to shake as he listened, thinking how when he awoke each morning he could never know what new catastrophe awaited him, what novel, Job-like species of pain hunkered in the shadows, or what manner of crisis, personal or political, he would be put through next. On the other end, as his Marty and Dexter shouted for him to join in their game, the agent in the Atlanta office was reporting almost gleefully the latest bounty the Bureau learned had been placed on his head.

  Usually, he suspected, they didn’t call when they discovered someone bent upon killing him. The policy was, he was sure, to simply sit back, wait, and see if the assassin made good on his promise. But this was different. The amount to be collected for killing him was $50,000. “Pretty high, eh?” the agent said. “Bet you didn’t know you were worth that much …”

  Even on his best day he didnt believe himself worth that much. Or the staggering smear campaign Hoover launched in 1964, aimed at exposing him, as the director put it, as “the most notorious liar in the country” and removing him from “the national picture.” His agents maintained a two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta’s Peach Street Towers filled with surveillance equipment, and kept a man in the place twenty-four hours a day, monitoring every call he made or received. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’d approved the first wiretaps on his home and offices (though not the fourteen microphone surveillances that came later) afte
r his brother, the president, expressed grave concern over the help the SCLC received from Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell. He remembered that conversation well. Kennedy invited him to the White House and during a stroll in the Rose Garden said, “They’re Communists, you’ve got to get rid of them. If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too—so we’re asking that you be careful.” He’d left that meeting convinced that Hoover’s office, not Kennedy’s, was the center of power in Washington. And that office was determined to see him dead.

  Having hung up, having forced himself to say, “Thank you for the information,” he closed his workroom door and slumped onto the chair in front of his desk. Suddenly he felt too tired to play with the children. Too tired to move. The call had washed away all his strength. For an instant he felt dizzy and lowered his head onto a pile of week-old letters begging for his attention. He’d faced death so many times before—the bomb that exploded in Room 30, his room at the Gaston Motel during the Birmingham campaign, flashed through his memories. But this? Oh, this new threat was something else. This plan to kill him had been hatched in Imperial, Missouri, at the home of John Sutherland, who was putting up the money. He was a Virginian, a product of military schools and a descendant of the Pilgrims; he stood firmly against the Movement, so much so that he founded the St. Louis Citizens Council and served in an antiblack organization of businessmen called the Southern States Industrial Council. As the agent told it, Sutherland knew an underworld figure named John Kauffmann, a drug dealer and operator of the Bluff Acres Motel, where stolen cars were dropped off occasionally by nickel-and-dime thugs of his acquaintance. One of them was Russel Byers. His brother-in-law John Paul Spica was serving a murder sentence in the Missouri State Penitentiary, sharing a cell with a penny-ante crook named James Earl Ray. Byers, the agent said, made one of his calls on Kauffmann that fall of 1966, and the motel owner asked him if he’d like to make some money. Sure would, Byers said. Then there’s someone, replied Kauffmann, I think you ought to meet.