God allowed Moses to discern the Land of Canaan from the top of Mount Horeb, but He would have the prophet die before entering it. At the Garden of Gethsemane, in a night of terror and anticipation before the impending captivity, torture, and slow execution, Christ asked God if he could be spared his fate. But God remained silent, and a few moments before dying on the cross, Christ could not help but voice his doubt. Even the other two men who were being crucified insulted him. God was so often darkness and terror. In the place where Jacob wrestled an angel or a man till daybreak, the presence of God remained and it was a dreadful place.
* * *
And right now the wrath of God was descending over Memphis in all its terrifying magnificence. Lightning strikes the trees. The forests catch on fire. The wind tears the roofs of the poor, and rain floods the homes and roads around the delta. She would be driving on one of those roads at that very second, the windshield pounded by gusts of wind and rain, the woman he had begged to come be with him, to endure a long journey for a short and secret encounter, at most two hours. At first Job is caught between Satan’s malevolence and God’s whim, but then he is punished for the intellectual arrogance of demanding an explanation. Jonah wanted to escape the terrible fate of prophecy, so God led him to the sailors who would throw him overboard during a storm and then sent a whale to swallow him.
Deep in his heart, he had resisted going back to Memphis just as Jonah had resisted the divine order to preach at Nineveh. Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. How many times he had wished to run away, like Jonah, to disappear overnight and abandon the exhausting and tyrannical mission that had fallen on his shoulders.
* * *
It had not been a call. The voice of God did not wake him in the middle of the night saying his name two times. He had not responded: Here I am. The patriarchs and the prophets heard voices, clear and unappealable orders. When he was blinded by the presence of Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul heard his voice. Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
But schizophrenics also hear voices. And there was something very dangerous, very presumptuous, in considering yourself the recipient of a divine command. In his case, it could have been just a matter of chance, a series of misunderstandings. At the beginning, in Montgomery in ’55, there was no voice from God at the top of a mountain or in a desert. It was an assembly in the early days of the boycott, tempestuous and disorderly, a vote to elect a provisional spokesperson for the nascent movement. He did not even volunteer as a candidate. He was younger and less experienced than most of the people there, a newcomer to the city, and was just getting used to being the pastor of a church. Someone nominated him and he was voted in. It could have been somebody else. He hadn’t even met Mrs. Parks before she refused to give up her seat on the bus. He had never taken a bus in Montgomery, or Boston in any of the years during his doctorate in that unimaginable world of New England, where you quickly got used to using the same doors, the same park benches, the same classrooms, the same libraries. In Montgomery, as in Boston, he did not take the bus because he had his own car, a present from his father when he left for the doctorate.
How could his fate be determined when everything depended on so many coincidences, decisions taken at the last minute without much conviction. He had returned south so reluctantly, against his wife’s preference and his own wishes, though he would not acknowledge this to her or even himself. The truth is that he came back because he did not want to go against his father’s wishes again. The fact that he had decided to pursue the doctorate away from home after graduation, instead of staying with the congregation in Atlanta, had already been a source of tension. Why do you need to study theology and philosophy to be a Baptist pastor? his father had asked.
It had been difficult to stand by his decision, but not as much as he had anticipated. Eventually, his father agreed to it. It was this capitulation, and that of his mother, who was devastated that he was going so far, that made him doubt his purpose. He had always wanted to be a good son. Leaving them was much harder than he was willing to admit. How could a divine mandate to lead the poor and the persecuted fall on someone so privileged, someone raised in a loving family, a comfortable home, always protected by his parents and his older sister.
The church was an extension of the house. From the games with his siblings and their shared boredom during Sunday school, he had moved on to helping his father with the church. God was an invisible member of their house. He imagined God, who was both irascible and benevolent in the Bible, with the imposing presence and the deep voice of his father. What talent for resistance could someone who has been trained to revere his elders, and who is used to a comfortable life, possibly have? Tied to a fate he could no longer escape, even if he lived to be quite old, he imagined other possible futures and past decisions that could have taken him elsewhere.
He thought, most of all, of his time in Boston. He remembered the winter light that flooded the classrooms, the meditative hours in the library, the long halls with books and desks and small lamps, the drawers with blank paper and pencils, the white snow gently falling outside the window. Religion was not a sum of miraculous fantasies and terrible prejudices, it was a vast field of study ennobled by the intellectual rigor of philosophy and a wealth of historical scholarship, philology, archeology.
To make his parents happy, he wrote letters suggesting a longing for home he no longer felt. He enjoyed everything with spontaneity. He went to every seminar and spent Sunday evenings, and often entire nights, in the silence of the library.
The students attended class dressed as formally as the professors. For a time he took to smoking a pipe just like the others, and he also learned to conceal his southern accent and sound just like them. In their company, sometimes he forgot he was black.
In the chapel, during the Sunday morning service, the pastors delivered their sermons and read biblical passages with a distinguished accent and a sober intonation, as if they were reciting Emerson or Milton. No shouting, no arms waving, no eyes closed in ecstasy, no clapping, no stomping on the wooden floors until the whole place was shaking, no trance, no hysteria, no screaming, no spit flying over the audience.
He had come to feel secretly ashamed of his origins. In Boston, he came to prefer the Lutheran hymns, the choirs of men and women dressed in black robes, singing Bach cantatas. When they started dating, Coretta took him to see chamber music and piano recitals. She had straight hair and light skin. In church, she sang the soprano arias in the St. Matthew Passion. Dressed as if they were attending a religious service, they went to the opera to hear Donizetti, the sacred oratorios by Handel and Mendelssohn, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the Mass in B Minor by Bach.
* * *
They could have lived like that in New England. Coretta would have had the singing career she wanted, though he would have preferred that she put it to the side when the time came to raise a family. He could have accepted one of the job offers he started getting as soon as he finished the doctorate, as soon as he saw, for the first time, full of pride, his new full name, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the distinction of the initials and abbreviations, “Ph.D.” A professor of theology or philosophy, with a wool suit and leather elbow patches, white shirt, bow tie, pipe, a medieval dark gown and tam for official ceremonies, an office filled with books, academic journals, student papers, a window facing a lawn on campus, a house in a tree-lined suburb, not too far from the church that he would attend with his family on Sunday, and where he would preach every now and then as guest pastor.
Beneath the substrate of pure conviction was always the murmur of doubt, skepticism, remorse. The price of conformity was very high, but so was the price of rebellion, and the consequences of his action would affect others as well. Others would have raised their voices even if he did not. With more anger, more courage, more direct experience of the hardships he had not known. Others had risen in even darker times, and had paid the ultimate price
without recognition or consequence for their executioners, while he got to study at a university in Boston and drive his own car to pick up his girlfriend and go to the classical music concerts and the student dances; while he had the luxury of traveling to Atlanta by plane during vacation and ordering his suits made to measure.
* * *
Moses could have had a splendid life as an Egyptian prince. He indulged in these wonderings and then felt ashamed of them. Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. How arrogant to compare oneself to a patriarch from the Old Testament; how insidious the suspicion that all was in vain. Instead of progress the years seemed to bring new possibilities for failure, new forms of bitterness. After every victory that seemed certain and luminous, there had been rage and new cruelty. Two weeks after the march in Washington, a bomb killed four little girls in a church in Birmingham on a clear Sunday morning in September. The tired crowd from the great march from Selma had yet to disperse when that gang of murderers who never was punished shot to death Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a blond woman, a mother of five, who had driven all the way from Detroit by herself to help the organizers. And after she was killed, the FBI lost no time spreading rumors about her, saying that she was a bad mother, a bad wife, a promiscuous woman who liked to sleep with black men.
Violence fueled more violence, and nonviolence. The righteous were humiliated and the killers went unpunished. The clear sense of victory, the intoxication of the struggle, the irrefutable virtue of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, had abandoned him in the last few years. In the early days of the movement, in Montgomery, in the incredulous joy of having resisted and prevailed in the boycott, he had believed that victories were not only possible but also irreversible. Three hundred and eighty-one days resisting, one after the other, walking on the sidewalks while the empty buses drove by, giving one another rides, enduring with dignity all the harassment by police.
Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. Black people in Montgomery had risen up, as miraculously as the crippled man in the Gospel, after more than three centuries of immobility and subjugation, and they had started marching.
Confident steps heading in one direction; not dreams of paradise, but concrete achievements. The right to sit in a bus or go to school, the wonder of common things, ordering a sandwich and a soda in a cafeteria, drinking from a public fountain, taking a stroll in a park, registering to vote without fear of being harassed, beaten, or even killed. But a little time went by and what they had conquered was lost, or someone found a loophole in a law to frustrate or delay the reforms.
School integration was decreed and the governors from the southern states simply closed the schools, preferring no education to classes with black people. And what good was it to be able to sit in the same cafeteria with white people if you had no money to buy a sandwich and a coffee? You could send your children to the same public schools now, but white people had already taken their kids elsewhere and now the classrooms were as run-down as the old schools that had once been reserved for your people.
The segregation that was no longer allowed under the law was now more effectively enforced with money. They spent millions of dollars sending rockets to the moon but fought over cents for public schools and hospitals and soup kitchens. Gutted neighborhoods, ravaged by crime, by the simultaneous brutality of police and gangs, by misery and ignorance; neighborhoods torched by the self-destructive anger of the very same people who had no means of getting away.
And the young people were angry, drunk on violence, behaving like gangsters, filled with the same hate that white people had toward them, mocking him and those who were like him, hurling insults like any old white racist, Martin Lucifer King, Martin Loser King.
He had seen them just a few days before, right there in Memphis, and before they even started yelling and breaking streetlamps and windows, he had known what was coming, he had felt the swell of the terrified crowd pushing forward, the primitive fear of being knocked down and crushed. He saw the frightened faces of his friends, and the striking workers with their identical banners, vowels and simple consonants, like the sounds of a prayer or a work song, I AM A MAN I AM A MAN I AM A MAN. The workers with their sun-damaged faces, their rough hands, their Sunday clothes, surrounded him to protect him, while the commotion grew in the tail of the march, on the slope down Beale Street, the display windows exploding like hailstorms, and the police officers preparing their shields and batons and sounding their sirens, grinning widely under the visors of their helmets, waiting for the perfect moment to launch their attack and plant the seed of terror in the rest of the crowd.
And while the young, in perfect formation, tore the banners to use the masts as weapons and began to throw rocks, breaking streetlights and windows, the shards of glass fell on the faces of terrorized people, screaming in panic, bleeding, fainting, overtaken by a flood that dragged everything in its path, the blindness of someone who is drowning and can’t get their head above water.
Later he saw his own face on the front page of the newspaper and felt ashamed by the public evidence of the fear he had felt: his body held by others, as if about to drown and not even trying to continue swimming, with his eyes wide open, a sheep or cow who has seen the glint of the blade that is coming for them.
* * *
He had never wished death more intensely than in those last few days, death because he knew he was too caught up in that world where there was no longer any other possible life for him. Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? To close one’s eyes and never have to open them again. To come home at night, very late, exhausted, after a long trip or an entire day of meetings; to get out of the car and look for the house keys under the dim streetlights, in the silence of a late hour; to have no time to even feel the impact, the bullet fired at close range from behind the honeysuckle tree; to die quickly and never know anything else. For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.
To close one’s eyes and be lost in sleep; to not wake up in anguish before the night is even over. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. To die so you don’t have to keep looking at the newspaper or at the television in anticipation of what they would be saying about you now.
The apostle of nonviolence was at the center of a riot caused by followers he could no longer control; he had left the scene cowardly, in a limousine that took him to the most luxurious hotel in Memphis, while his people burned the whole place down.
There was nothing they would not accuse him of. He was a communist and a traitor, a social climber who accepts money from white people. While he was safe at his luxury hotel, a cop was firing at a black boy at close range and then finishing him off on the ground with a bullet to the head. He preached evangelical poverty but had no trouble accepting gifts and treats from the millionaires of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, the docile black man who assured them there would be no revolution, the one who flew as a guest of honor in Nelson Rockefeller’s private jet. While American soldiers were dying heroically in Vietnam, he was taking the side of the communists, the enemies.
* * *
He had wished to simply die. He had longed for that moment in Harlem when the letter opener sank into his chest and his white shirt was quickly soaked in blood, the sweet instant when he lost consciousness. For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest. He had secretly wished, with obsessive impatience, with a morbid desire for sacrifice and martyrdom, that one of the death threats finally came true, one of those anonymous letters or calls in the middle of the night.
One shot and everything would end. One shot and perhaps he would even be lucky enough to not hear or feel anything. No one knew that he wasn’t brave: death was the only thing that no longer scared him. Much worse than dying is to never rest, always running late, always with the knowledge that somewhere else there’s a crowd waiting for you, that you will have to get
on a stage again, face the blinding lights, and gather all your strength to repeat words that remain true and just, but that you simply can’t bear to hear yourself say again.
* * *
But this night, at the temple, after a few minutes of struggling to find his rhythm, the words began to flow on their own with a power that he had not anticipated or even thought he possessed anymore. They did not feel like his words. They did not flow from his tired repertoire. Their metallic echo filled and shook the room like the thunder outside. He felt overwhelmed by the words and hypnotized by the metal and cadence of his own voice, no longer governed by reason or will, and much less by the rhetorical devices of a preacher. Something similar had happened in those days of fear and solitude at the prison in Birmingham, the solitary confinement cell in a basement where only the sounds of boots, metal, and rats could be heard. A trance. Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison: and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.
Someone had left a newspaper in the cell. In the fold of a pocket, he found a pencil they missed during the pat-down. He began to write with the light that filtered through the bars, using the margins of the newspaper. There was barely any light and his eyes hurt from trying to focus on the small handwriting. He had to take advantage of every blank space. When steps approached, he hid the pencil and sat on the newspaper. At some point, he began to write so fast, the writing was running ahead of his thinking. The ecclesiastical formalities had given way to vindicated and outraged vehemence.
He would sharpen the pencil against the wall and continue filling margin after margin. When he ran out of space, a black prisoner who distributed food gave him some scraps of paper. It was so hot inside the cell, he had to keep wiping the sweat from his hands and forehead to protect the paper. He wrote without uncertainty, without turning back, with absolute conviction that he was right, that this was the truth and it was being dictated to him.
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