Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  Morning pushed aside the previous night’s shadows. He stubbed out his cigarette in a bean-bag ashtray, considered again the case of Chaym Smith, then dug a finger into his mouth to dislodge a sliver of rugelach stuck in his dental work, feeling at last comfortable with this decision.

  3

  Twenty-four hours later, on July 18, Citizen King gave his consent. Most of that night, amidst billowing smoke from burning stores and ricocheting pistol reports in the darkness, I hastily loaded the trunk of my battered old Chevelle with cardboard boxes of film and files about the Movement and the minister. Amy agreed with King that it would be best to separate Smith from the city for a while. Removing him far from his old haunts, the locations that reminded him of his losses, might be just the caisson required for restoring his life. Downstate, in rural Jackson County (fondly called Little Egypt by locals who’d named their hot, dusty towns Cairo and Thebes after Old Testament cities), a few miles from Makanda, Mama Pearl owned a hundred-year-old farmhouse handed down from her father. For two weeks that would be, as Amy called it, our Nest.

  Provided we escaped the South Side in one piece.

  The riot’s devastation spread over 140 blocks, spilling into Slumdale, and we had to get across town to Smith’s room. The minister was now on the West Side, preaching brotherhood and peaceful revolution on streets that ran slick with blood. Black blood, as if in the city (any city) ritual acts of murder had to be repeated night after night to renew the city itself. I feared the fires might burn forever, akin to brimstone, for the influence of the neocolonial empire King so relentlessly criticized stretched from Southeast Asia to Rhodesia, Colombia to Watts. One block from the minister’s place, the police were shoving women and children into paddy wagons. Teenagers tossed Molotov cocktails at squad cars. At the corner of Sixteenth two white patrolmen weighted down by duty-belts chased a black teenager in blue jeans and a baseball cap through clouds of tear gas eerily backlit by the blaze from a torched pawnshop. Looters spilled from the building, hauling away portable Motorola televisions, shotguns, bolt-action rifles, and radios piled high in wobbly-wheeled shopping carts.

  When the boy slipped on broken glass from the store’s shattered window the cops fell upon him, cracking his bones with a flurry of blows I felt echo through my own body. My stomach clenched. Spotting another looter, the cops took off, leaving the boy bleeding on the sidewalk. As in a dream, I watched myself running toward the spot where the boy lay rocking back and forth, his legs drawn up to his chest. He was blinded by blood streaming into his eyes. Teeth hung loose in his head. “Don’t move,” I said. “Let me help you, brother.” I reached down, holding out my right hand so the boy could rise. Without warning, he kicked straight up at my knees, bringing me crashing to the sidewalk. I felt blows falling across my face, breaking my glasses. He buried his shoe in my stomach. I felt his fingers snaking through my pockets, emptying them of my wallet, keys, coins. I thought, All right, now he’s finished. But I was wrong. He began kicking me again, intent on killing me for the thrill of it. I could barely see, but I crawled to the curb, pulling myself along the glass-sprinkled concrete to a parked car, and rolled under it, only to feel his fingers tighten on my right ankle. He pulled me back into the open, bringing his heel down on my back. I knew then I was going to die. Just another casualty of the night’s rioting. I saw him reach behind his back into the waistband of his trousers, and as if by magic a gleaming switchblade appeared in his hand, which he raised high above his head, his eyes glittering to slits as he chose the spot on my chest where he would bury the blade. Then, miraculously, I heard a crack like wood snapping cartilage. The boy cried out. Moments later, he was gone, blending back into the night, replaced by Chaym Smith, who stood above me, breathing heavily and holding a two-by-four he’d found in the street and shouting for me to give him my keys and get in the car before we all were mistaken for rioters and rounded up with the rest.

  “Thank you—”

  “Sama-sama.”

  “What?”

  “I said you’re welcome, in Indonesian. Just get in the goddamn car, Bishop.”

  “Chaym … if you hadn’t stopped him—”

  “Uh-hunh, I know. You’d be dead. C’mon, let’s go.”

  Smith slid over from the passenger side to the driver’s seat and hunched over the wheel. Still shaken, unable to keep my hands from trembling, I gathered my things off the pavement and climbed in back behind Amy, who was holding a shopping bag full of King’s old clothing. I fumbled through my coat, hoping I still had the three- by four-inch copy of the King James Bible, a gift long ago from my mother, which I carried as a kind of talisman for times of trouble, or just to study when I rode the subway. Not that I really felt much anymore when I fingered the Books tissue-thin pages. Try as I might, I no longer could breathe life into the vision the Bible embodied—or, for that matter, into any system of meaning, though I desperately wanted to, and always kept the Book nearby out of habit, often just letting its pages wing open to a passage selected by chance, hoping someday it would speak to me again.

  Amy turned round in her seat and removed my glasses, which were dangling off my face, then took one of the minister’s handkerchiefs and held it against the fresh cuts on my forehead. “Oh, Matthew,” she groaned, “why didn’t you stay by the car?”

  “Yeah,” said Smith, “you’re lucky I decided not to wait for you and came on my own. You owe me one, Bishop. Don’t forget that. And what the hell d’you think you were doing anyway?”

  “I was just trying to help,” I said. “He probably thought I was the police coming back.”

  “Sure,” said Smith, “that’s why he was cleaning out your pockets, right?” He laughed wickedly. “Guys like you got a lot to learn. You really do. Good thing you weren’t in Korea with me. The enemy just loved would-be missionary types like you. Know what those crafty bastards would do if five of us were out on patrol? They’d wound two Yanks, knowin’ that’d end the fight because it would take three men to get the injured back to the base. And we had to get them back, bein’ Americans and Christians and all that. They counted on it. They saw it as a weakness that we couldn’t leave our own behind. And you know what else I saw, Bishop? You know what they’d do when they killed a black soldier and a white one? They’d cut off their heads, put the white one on the black man’s, body and the black one on the white boy. It was a joke, okay? I saw that, and it showed me there’s two kinds of people in this world. Predators and prey. Lions and lunch. You see it any other way, buddy, and people will chump you off.” He glanced back at the little book I held. “If you’d been through half of what I have, you’d put that Bible away and learn what time it is—or learn how to read it right.”

  “That’s unfair,” said Amy. “Matthew was just trying to help that boy.”

  “Yeah, and you saw what happened. Some people can’t be helped. I know that. You reach down to pull somebody up, he’s liable to drag you down to the bottom with him, then spit on you to boot. Did I hear you call him brother?” Smith chortled, his head tipping back. “You didn’t even know his name! Did you call him that ’cause he was black, or was that a church thing? You ever thought about what brothers are really like? Romulus and Remus, say. Or Jacob and Esau? How they can hate each other, especially if one is doing better? See, if I were you, I’d forget about that brotherhood malarkey, and remember what they said during the French Revolution. Fraternité ou la mort. What I’m saying—and you may not like this—is that in the Struggle, who you are is less important than what you are: a splib, an outcast united to others by oppression, by blood, and let me tell you, buddy, that’s one frail, forced confederacy, with some brothers and sisters who can be downright scary when they want to close ranks against the racist enemy, some of ’em all but saying, Be my brother or I’ll kill you!”

  “No,” Amy said, shocked. “How can you say that? I thought you said you wanted to preach.”

  “What’d you think I was just doing?”

  “I mean, be
a right and proper minister!”

  “Oh … well, I did. Once.”

  “What about now? Last night you talked differently. You were almost begging for help. But tonight you don’t sound like the same person at all. Which are you?”

  Smith was quiet, his hands squeezed round the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock. Then he rummaged through his trouser pocket, found a linty, flecked stick of Doublemint gum, and stuck the wad into his cheek. “Sometimes I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you can help me figure that out.” He looked sheepishly at her. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t know what I was saying. It’s been like that since I was at Elgin. Can you forgive me?”

  At that Amy softened. Her profile from where I sat dissolved from irritation to sympathy, as if it was the minister himself who’d appealed to her for understanding, seeing how he’d looked in a flickerflash trompe l’oeil uncannily like King when he apologized. For an instant I could have sworn Smith was playing her masterfully like a finely tuned lyre, one keyed to her (all of our) affection for King, fluidly shifting from one mask to another as the occasion demanded, as if maybe the self was a fiction—or, if not that, a multiplicity of often conflicting profiles. He seemed full of Machiavellian deceits and subterfuges. To my astonishment, he glided from the tribal languages of the Academy to Niggerese, a skill most educated black men possessed (myself included), but in Smith’s hands, black slang became a weapon used for startling effect, like tossing a grenade into the middle of a polite tea party. As he put rubber to the road, tear gas drifted into the car, the shock of inhaling it like breathing in burning coals or hellfire when it filled the tissues of my lungs. I pressed one hand over my mouth, but I couldn’t breathe or see. Smith gave more gas to the Chevelle, gunning it through an intersection, the speedometer riding sixty, then he stomped on the brake and began to skid. Up ahead, an elderly barefoot black man, wearing only wrinkled blue pajamas, held his bloody forehead and stepped blindly into the beam of the Chevelle’s headlights. Smith cut the wheel hard, running the car onto the sidewalk. A mailbox sprang up in the way, and he cranked the wheel again, passing just close enough to throw gravel against the man’s kneecaps but leaving him otherwise untouched as the car slammed through another intersection and at last came to rest in front of Smith’s building.

  Amy was shaking. “You almost hit that man!”

  “Fool shouldn’ta been out.” Smith rolled his window down, now that the tear gas was behind us, and coughed. “Let’s get my things. It won’t take long, I don’t have that much.”

  Actually, it would take less time than he knew. All of Smith’s belongings were piled on the street and stairs in front of 3721 Indiana Avenue. “I don’t believe this,” he whispered. On the sidewalk his shoulders slumped; he looked from his possessions dumped like refuse up to his landlady’s third-floor window. He climbed the stair, favoring his left leg, whipped out his key, and stuck it about a quarter-inch into the door before it stopped. He twisted it once. Twice, then it broke off in his hand. “She did it,” he was still whispering, staring at the fragment on his palm. “Mrs. Thomas locked me out …”

  “It’s all right,” said Amy. “We can put some of this in Matthew’s car and come back later.”

  Smith threw his key into the street and headed for the rear of the building. “Do what you want with it.”

  “Wait! Where are you going?”

  “Got some business to tend to. I’ll be back.”

  After he disappeared into the alley, Amy glanced at me, shrugged, then began loading Smith’s belongings into the trunk and backseat. I moved to help, handing her a framed photograph of two young black servicemen so fit their uniforms seemed molded to their muscular frames, both grinning toward the camera, one of them (Smith, I was sure) holding up two fingers like rabbit ears behind the head of a friend I guessed was Stackhouse; and I found several paintings, one canvas portraying Jesus as a work-toughened carpenter, rendered (Amy told me) in the style of G. Bierman’s The Ascension; another—a watercolor in the manner of Kawase Hasui—depicted an ancient temple all but hidden by jungle growth and was entitled Borobudur, while a third showed a sparsely furnished hospital room in Elgin as van Gogh might have imagined it, and in the last I saw a young black woman with three good-looking boys done in the vein of a Matisse. I stared at these paintings for the longest time, lost in them, startled by Smith’s talent, his shape-shifting ability to change styles as rapidly as others changed their garments, and then Amy was telling me to hurry up, so I moved on, passing to her some shoes eaten away at the soles, slacks and shirts so old they could only have come from rummage sales or Goodwill; there were a few dented pots and pans, a battered saxophone, a worn Bible with notecards inserted throughout its pages, sandals made of rice straw, a straight razor, a cloth bag with Chinese characters I could not read, a wicker hat, a Smith & Wesson .357 (Model 27), a seven-inch Army knife in its stiff leather sheath, and wrapped in a quilted blanket a shabby black robe and a tatami mat. Judging by the cardboard boxes at my feet, whatever Smith lacked in clothing he more than made up for in books. There were volumes from Moody Bible Institute, translations from the Coptic Gnostic Library (unearthed in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt), the Rhineland sermons of Meister Eckhart, the Dhammapada, texts on the Sufi and Tantrism, and on their front pages, in their margins, he had scribbled his commentaries in a script so small, so microscopic, it might have come from the hand of a mathematician. In other boxes I found Japanese pornography—magazines with page upon glossy page of photos showing teenagers (some of them dressed as schoolgirls) doing things I dare not describe, but which I guessed he used for masturbation, and then!—I saw playing cards depicting a different, more terrifying kind of pornography: Thai pictures taken in morgues, showing bodies in different stages of decomposition, used by Theravada monks for meditation on the transitory nature of all things.

  With each box and shopping bag of Smith’s things I found myself falling through his past and into passageways of a constantly mutating soul which, I’d wager, even his therapists at Elgin had not fully charted. Poking through a shopping bag, I pulled out expired passports stamped by half the countries left of Hawaii, a sketchbook filled with his poetry and drawings—penciled images of well-known locations in the Loop, and possible portraits of what his own father might look like (one was a derelict feeding himself from a Dumpster, another was Daddy King)—hypodermic needles I was afraid to handle, and eight scrapbooks in which he’d pasted news articles about, I thought, himself. I looked again. These were stories about King, some of them dating back to the Montgomery bus boycott. He’d saved everything—from the Time magazine “Man of the Year” cover story on King to cartoonist Mort Drucker’s satire of the Movement in Mad magazine. Smith had flagged the numerous articles critical of King, as if he took a delicious pleasure in publicity that diminished the man he so resembled and clearly revered.

  I was dazed, staring at these pages, when he came back, sweating, with the scent of gasoline on his clothes. Climbing into the car, he said, “We got to go. Right now.”

  “We’re not finished,’ I said. “We’re still loading your things.”

  “Forget them! We got to go now.”

  Dropping one of the boxes, I climbed in. I cranked the starter as Amy closed the trunk and got in the back, then I eased out into the street. Smith grumbled, “Keep driving,” so I floored the pedal and headed south. In my rearview mirror I saw smoke billowing from his building on Indiana Avenue. Smith grinned.

  “Chaym—”

  “Don’t look back.” He stretched out and closed his eyes for the six-hour, three-hundred-mile trip downstate. “Musta been the rioters done that. Gonna try to get some rest.”

  Amy kicked off her leather sandals, then curled up in a corner of the backseat, her head pillowed on one of the bags from Smith’s apartment. All the way to Champaign I drove in silence broken only by news reports on the radio. During the night National Guardsmen had clanked into the city like centurions to
reinforce local police. The mayor’s office placed blame for the devastation on King’s presence in Chicago. Listening to that newscast, I found it easy to conclude there was precious little light in politics, which, I remembered, Henry Adams had called the “systematic organization of hatreds.” King’s efforts in Chicago had pried open a Pandora’s box of racial paradoxes, not the least being that in the wake of Black Power’s appeal in the northern ghettos his political approach was unraveling at the seams. Like so many who admired the King of 1963, the piecemeal reformist Daley championed his success in Selma, but along with his six black aldermen who controlled wards on the South and West sides, he would not concede to the anticapitalist King of 1966 that his city was a bastion of bigotry based on economic exploitation. On local television, Rev. Joseph H. Jackson pointed out to the minister that Chicago had problems but was not the Deep South. Furthermore, some said, the objectives of the Movement were hazy. Many blacks wondered if one of the fundamental goals of freedom should be the chance to live next door to white people in places like Cicero and Hyde Park. To be sure, the SCLC proved housing discrimination by sending black allies to real estate agents, who steered them away from properties they eagerly sold later that same afternoon to whites. But could a family living on $4,000 a year afford a home with a view of Lake Michigan in Winnetka? King’s critics dismissed the battle for that sort of integration as bourgeois. And for all the riveting drama of the minister’s previous campaigns, his desperate bid at sparking a fire of social change in America’s second-largest city, and regaining the reins of the Movement from modern-day Zealots eager to pick up the gun, led only that July to men and women foot-weary from marching and fires in the streets that gutted only the black ghetto. The minister traveled by police escort (many derided that) to bars, churches, and meeting halls, begging angry black crowds to replace violence with mass action aimed at disruption, sending the city officials a collective Thoreauvian no to institutionalized inequality.