Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  It was beginning to rain. The air was cool, turning to chill. A few fireflies drifted by. From the outside, Bethel was quiet as a tomb. There were no services on weekday evenings. I let myself in, soaking wet, switched on the lights, and immediately the sedate ambience of the church crept into me. Naturally, I first noticed our labor—our lives distilled, a kind of prayer itself—in the repairs to the entryway, pews, balustrades, and pulpit. All of it anonymous, of course. Unsigned. Nevertheless, I knew a twinge of satisfaction as I walked to the front row of benches, my footsteps echoing loudly; then I sat down and dripped. Wind battered the high stained-glass windows. Rain drummed on the roof. I looked at the new doors we’d installed on either side of the stage, and then my eyes came to rest on the two portraits of Jesus behind the podium. In one an angel comforted him in the Garden of Gethsemane; in the other, Simon the Cyrene, an African, carried to Golgotha the heavy wooden cross to which the bone-weary Nazarene would be nailed by his enemies. In the stillness of Bethel’s sanctuary, I found myself falling toward that image, wondering how Simon, a man from the country, felt when the Roman soldiers conscripted him to shoulder the rood: a black man from the most despised tribe on earth given the priceless gift of easing the suffering of a savior. In that scene, he was an extra. On stage for but a sentence in Matthew 27:32. He was given no speech. In Hollywood, he would have been paid the union minimum. Most likely he wouldn’t be found in the credits. And after one magnificent moment of serendipity and contingency, of accident and chance (not unlike the young King’s being in Montgomery at the right moment to merge with history), Simon blended anonymously—invisibly—back into the wailing crowd. Outside history. I felt I knew him. Was him. No man could equal the Nazarene. But Simon? I was thinking that here was a black man I might measure myself against, a standard I could attain, when behind me I heard a soft-breathing voice, one as firm and deep as an old country well.

  “Matthew—”

  Startled, I swung my head round and saw the minister sitting behind me. My jaw fell halfway. My breath went out of me. “Sir, I didn’t know you were—”

  “Uh-uh, it’s me, buddy.”

  “Chaym?”

  I knuckled my eyes. I looked again. It was Smith, shaven, with his hair cropped short, wearing a blue suit and tie. There was a rain-dampened trenchcoat spread over his knees. He looked more like King than at any time before. “Where have you been?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I doubt it. Naw, I can’t be saved …”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Just talk. They got me a new place to stay and my wallet’s fat.”

  “You took it?”

  “I don’t have much choice, do I?” He let his shoulders relax and reached into a pocket of his suitcoat. “Maybe you don’t understand. They’ve got me over a barrel. And I’m scared. I ain’t ashamed to say that. The things they’re talking about … what they want me to do to embarrass him … the shit they’re up to in Memphis … I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I don’t want to go to prison. I’d die before I’d let anybody lock me up again, but I don’t know if I want to live if I do what they’re asking.” He closed his eyes, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. “They’re outside in the car. They let me go to the farmhouse to pick up some of my things. When I didn’t see you there, I figured maybe you’d be here. I told them I left some of my stuff at Bethel …” He withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his coat and handed it to me. “I found one of these. Thought I’d give it to you, just to tidy things up a bit.”

  I opened the paper. It was the Commitment Blank. The decalogue of the Movement. Which he’d signed.

  “Give that to the sister for me, all right?”

  “Chaym—”

  “It’s over, Bishop.”

  “Wait.” I tried to lighten things a little. “I thought you wanted to help with my salvation.”

  He raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Sorry. You’re on your own. But there is one thing you can do for me.”

  Had it not been for the wink he gave me, I would have thought I was listening and talking to King, How could I refuse him anything? “What?”

  “Pray for me. I can’t do that for myself.”

  “Of course. I will, but—”

  “Do it now.”

  He waited, fixing me so fiercely with his eyes I turned in my seat, bringing my hands together, the wrinkled Movement decalogue between my fingers. But as before, no words came to me. My faith was frail. Payers had always failed me. Like millions of black men, I was a bastard who’d never known his father—the word used for people like me was “illegitimate.” Whoever my father was, he’d rejected me long ago. How could I pray to a Father? I squeezed my eyes tighter, thinking of Chaym’s troubles, and those of the minister. Slowly I petitioned whatever powers that be, regardless of what they thought of me, to keep them from harm, praying not for myself as I’d always done, but instead or those I loved, and as the sense of their fragility and my own filled me, our lives of a few hours in a world of two minutes, the evil that waited outside our door, I felt something slam inside my chest, then hot tears were hopping down my cheeks, and instead of offering words I wept for my counterfeit, fatherless status, gave myself over to it shamelessly, and by the end of my halting, stumbling appeal I felt emptied, no longer trying to bring a distant God’s grace to my finite desires as His cast-aside son, but only wishing Thy will be done.

  I took out my handkerchief, cleaned my spectacles, and blew my nose. I turned in my seat. Smith was gone. The benches behind me, row after row, were unpeopled, and the front door of Bethel AME creaked open onto the unsearchable darkness, as if a djinn had passed into our lives and just as miraculously disappeared.

  12

  It was the greatest mistake of his life, and he had no one but himself to blame. Sitting with his arms folded across his knees beside an equally baffled and speechless Abernathy in the Rivermont Hotel, he stared, his face squeezed shut, at televised scenes of bloodshed and civil breakdown on the downtown streets of Memphis. He’d been out there just minutes before, leading a crowd of six thousand down Main Street from the Clayborn Temple to protest the city’s blatantly racist treatment of black sanitation workers. They’d marched all of three blocks before he heard glass breaking in clothing stores behind him. Turning, he saw black teenagers, some wearing stocking caps to hold their processed hair in place, pillaging shoes and suitcoats priced at $89.95 through plate-glass windows, then the police moving toward them, and he’d cried out, “Stop this, I won’t lead a violent march,” but it was too late. Evil was free. To save his life aides pulled him into a passing car, sped through the police barricades, and delivered him, not back to the black-owned and -operated Lorraine Motel, but to a deluxe hotel in a white neighborhood overlooking the Mississippi.

  “God Almighty, we waltzed right into this one,” Abernathy’s eyes watered as he watched cops with butchwax crewcuts driving elderly black demonstrators in raincoats from the empty streets onto sidewalks, where they pinned them to the pavement, jamming their knees into the backs of anyone who resisted. “Why the devil didn’t somebody do their homework before we got here?”

  “Ralph, you’ve got to get me out of Memphis.”

  “Soon,” Abernathy said. “As soon as we can settle things here.”

  “I don’t think I can take any more—”

  “Tomorrow. We’ve got a flight in the morning.”

  “Ralph …”

  “Yes?”

  “Am I doing any good?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  In the next room the phone was ringing. There was pounding on the hotel’s door. From what he could tell, the hallway was filled with people. James Lawson’s folks, no doubt. And reporters—they were always at his heels, asking him to comment on everything colored men did on this earth, or analyze every new political development, f
orever asking him for answers, predictions, opinions. In his youth, right out of B. U., he had four answers for any question the media posed to him. Fifteen years later what he wanted most for himself—for Martin—was a brief withdrawal, a retreat for meditation and reflection. But now they had a bona fide catastrophe, one with his name attached to it. One they could say destroyed his beliefs forever.

  Abernathy let his head fall back on the sofa; he stared at the white ceiling. Then, abruptly, he said, “ML, you’ve got to talk to them.”

  His insides were shaking. Brackish fluids from his belly kept climbing up his throat, and he kept swallowing to force down the backwash. The room was swimming. It felt wrong, all of it. Outside the window of his two-bedroom suite, in a garden that made him think of Gethsemane, trees were leaved lusciously, the quiet was broken only by songbirds while downtown the police were painting the streets with blood. He clamped shut his eyes. Now he understood the meaning of Paul’s words, “I die daily.”

  “Not now …”

  “You want me to run interference?”

  “Please, I can’t see anybody right now.” His voice shook. “Buy me some time.”

  Abernathy gave him a pat on his shoulder, then pulled his suitcoat off the back of the chair, slipped his arms through the sleeves, adjusted his tie, and went to answer the door. Once Abernathy was gone, he threw up on the sofa. Then he put his head in his trembling hands and cried until he felt clean. He’d wept often and easily in 1967, trailing tears across a continent, from Atlanta to Washington, from New York to Marks, Mississippi, where in preparation for the ambitious Poor People’s Campaign he’d interviewed black tenant workers with teeth colored like Indian corn. In their tin-roofed shacks he saw barefoot children, their stomachs bloated, wearing clothes woven from dirt: babies living in conditions as miserable as those of the Untouchables in India, but Gandhi had given them a different title, Harijans (“children of God”), and the government officials he and Coretta met were sincere in their commitment to programs aimed at alleviating the suffering of a class it had despised and oppressed for centuries. If there, he wondered, then why not in the wealthiest nation in the world? If America had done so many special things to suppress Negroes, why couldn’t it do something special for them? Other ministers, black and white—particularly white ones from rich churches—reminded him that when Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, a woman brought him costly fragrant oil, which set his disciples to complaining, “To what purpose is this waste when the ointment might have been sold for much and given to the poor,” and to this Jesus replied, “Ye shall have the poor always with you.” Indeed, white preachers cited this often; they were the ones he chastised in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” and to them he replied with a passage of his own: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” But the words of Christ were the horn of his salvation. Poverty would always exist, he knew that. Prejudice, so hydra-headed, could never entirely be eliminated. He knew that too; but no piety from the pages of Scripture could ever justify the fact that the world’s suffering poor in the modern era were predominantly black and brown, women and children.

  Later that night, as he drank to dull the pain in his mouth (he’d ground down on his teeth and crushed a filling), he watched baton-wielding motorcycle policemen, jackbooted and jacketed, wade into black rioters on Main Street. Three thousand National Guardsmen and a phalanx of olive-green tanks and trucks rumbled like thunder into town, imposing a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Reports coming through the television told of two hundred eighty arrested, sixty-two clubbed and wounded, and one sixteen-year-old boy killed. No matter what anyone said, that death was on his soul. His critics were right—sometimes he was a damned poor organizer. But how could he oversee everything? Be everywhere at once? He felt he was caught in a current sweeping him relentlessly forward, one in which he was drowning, unable to catch his breath or keep his head above water as the waves propelled him helplessly on like a man hurtling over Niagara Falls. Abernathy ordered from room service but could not get him to touch a thing on the tray. Or speak, for he felt dim in understanding, weak in flesh, and cold in his heart.

  He paced the turquoise carpeted floors of their hotel room in his stocking feet, thinking of that dead teenage boy, blowing cigarette smoke, his collar open and sweat-stained, retracing every step that had directed him away from the prodigious work of preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign, with its impossible logistics, to leading this tragic march for the sanitation workers. At first, their problems with Mayor Henry Loeb seemed peripheral to the Movement and did not draw his attention until the day, February 12, when thirteen hundred black workers went on strike after the city refused to recognize their union and rejected its demands for a ten percent wage increase and benefits. They marched, wearing and carrying signs proclaiming “I AM a Man.” Negroes in the Memphis community rallied behind the strikers, who now and then skirmished with the police. They listened to civil rights leaders at Mason Temple Church urge them not to return to their jobs before their demands were met. Mayor Loeb’s response was to dig in, refusing to talk to their representatives, and he promised to fire all the strikers. The city brought forth an injunction to halt demonstrations on the workers behalf. Local ministers decided there was only one man who could shore up their battle against Loeb, whom blacks had hugely voted against during his campaign for office.

  As Abernathy dozed, he went back to the television, turning the volume down low, on his face the flickering television’s glow as the full-scale riot raged on. Transfixed, unable to turn away from the violence, he remembered how he’d turned James Lawson’s request to address a Memphis rally over and over in his mind. The timing seemed wrong. He was in the midst of raising money for the proposed three-month spring offensive for the poor, an assault that would force Congress to directly confront economic injustice in America and realize a dream long nurtured by predecessors such as A. Philip Randolph. But how could he turn away from this other just cause? These black sanitation workers needed a nationally visible champion. Earlier in the year two black crewmen were crushed in a grisly accident caused by a garbage truck’s compressor. In early February sewer workers were sent home for a day because of bad weather, but while whites received a full day’s wage, the blacks were only paid for two hours. The injustices in Memphis were clear, for, as Marx might put it, the sanitation workers provided “socially necessary labor” without which the city would smother in its own sludge. Yet despite the value of their work, these men, who tramped every day down hot alleyways with the filth of the affluent packed in plastic tubs on their backs, and swept away rats and maggots and the stench of so-called civilized life so the wealthy could move about in clean homes and bright workplaces—these invisible men in Memphis, whose clothes were perpetually scented with the waste of others, were denied the most basic forms of decency. Their situation perfectly mirrored the point he wanted to drive home with the Poor People’s Campaign. One of his aides jokingly remarked that he was always operating two steps ahead of where he actually was. Perhaps, the aide suggested, he needed to get over his inability to say no to anyone in need, a comment he brushed aside, pointing out that his tour of Mississippi would bring him near Memphis, and once there he would carefully test the waters to see how deep he should dive in.

  It so happened that the waters in Memphis were pleasantly warm and felt just fine. On March 18, he spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of nearly seventeen thousand that hung on his every word as he told them to put aside their class differences and join ranks behind the striking garbagemen, whom he called “as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t work, disease is rampant.” For every sentence he sang, the crowd sang back, That’s right! and Hallelujah! They stamped their feet, they cheered, and he got into the swing of it, strengthened by their energy, at one with their hopes and dreams of dignity. The injunction wouldn’t stop them, he
said. Nothing would turn them around because they were tired, so tired, from working day and night and never seeing a living wage. Their men were sick of having their manhood denied, their wives and daughters of being domestic servants. The crowd rocked to his preaching that Monday night, roared its approval. And why not? This was Tennessee and he was a son of the South. There were no nationalists here. The Black Power plague hadn’t infected Memphis, not like in Chicago. He was home again. He understood these good, Galilean people. He was of them, and they were happily in the palm of his hand, just as in Birmingham and Montgomery. Lord have mercy! This was what he’d needed for so long, and in that giddy, feel-good moment he made them a promise. If they marched together on Friday, if every working man and woman joined in, and the children too, then they would win. And he promised himself he would lead them.

  It should have been a triumphant march, an exuberant overture, or trial run for the Poor People’s Campaign. The problems began when his flight from New York to Memphis was late by two hours. The parade started without him. A little before noon Abernathy met him at the airport and hurried him to the Clayborn Temple; then he was rushed by car toward the front of six thousand restless, edgy Tennesseans already on the move. In the backseat, peering out, he realized something was very wrong. This wasn’t a line of protesters. It felt more like an undisciplined mob. Toward its end he saw young people holding up placards that read “Black Power Is Here.” They were the Invaders, his driver said. None of them cared for his message of nonviolence—they were disciples of Stokely and Rap Brown—and they had threatened to disrupt the march if they were not included. Fact was, they’d been a problem since the Memphis strike began. “And you didn’t tell me?” he asked, grabbing the front seat and pulling himself forward, which jostled his driver. Great Peter only knew why they’d held back this information. He struck the seat and his driver jumped, hunching his shoulders, bringing the car to a stop. Up ahead, the police were closing off Main Street. It was too late to turn back. Whithersoever he went he knew he would find them, the violent in spirit, the herren-moralists, the Nietzscheans. Turning the door handle, lifting himself out of the car, he silently said a prayer, knowing that men of conviction had to act, though always on the basis of partial information, blindly forging ahead and hoping for the best. The word for this from time immemorial, he knew, was faith.