Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  Yet I wondered if the legal and histrionic tactics of the Movement might one day prove more costly than anyone imagined. One could not hold a referendum for racial justice in America, a vote, because—as everyone knew—whites would surely cast their ballots for, at best, gradual change. And in the South for no change at all. What the nation needed in the early 1960s was to be electrified by having the evils at its core uncovered. The minister was a master at that. And at enlisting the powers of the federal government to accelerate the end of American apartheid. But I wondered: Would the wounds uncovered ever heal? At times I felt uncomfortable with the SCLC’s and NAACP’s reliance, their dependency and complete faith in Washington’s clout, the protection it offered black people—but at what price? Nothing, my mother once told me, came without a price; there was always a trade-off of some kind, even though one might not see it clearly in the beginning. Mightn’t whites come to perceive Negroes as no longer a victimized class but a privileged one, thus leading to a resentment and a lack of respect and racial disdain greater than anything witnessed during the era of Jim Crow? Mightn’t too much reliance on the federal government, even in private affairs such as rearing a family, lead to the inability to do for oneself, unhampered by bad laws, that was the Movement’s original purpose?

  I switched channels and found an all-music station playing the Supremes, then looked back at Amy. She slept with one finger brushing her lips, and as I looked at her I felt lost. Brown freckles ran right across her nose, and since she lay facing the east, sunlight brought out highlights in her hair. She seemed to grow quieter and sleep more deeply with each county we put between ourselves and the dislocating spirit of the city. Back there, her apartment had five locks on the door. On top of that, she lived in a section of town so crimeridden that she was obliged to padlock every door inside too. It was a frightful way to live, in fear, barricaded behind your door each evening, wondering if a neighbor might kill you in your sleep, and it was that dreadful situation the minister hoped to change.

  I knew his odds were bad.

  The nonviolent Movement drew successfully from the ranks of the black middle class, students at Fisk, and liberal whites in its early days, but stalled and sputtered in poor, grassroots communities. King himself subjected it to this criticism, saying voting rights and integrated lunch counters cost the nation nothing. The new campaign—class struggle—would indeed be costly. Yet over and over he insisted that the Movement needed to wage war on two fronts. First, changing the souls of men so that they not only protested for peace but in themselves were peace embodied, loving in even life’s smallest affairs. And, second, he called for changing society so the soul might have a field in which to flourish. Neither front, he said, could be ignored, for one reinforced the other. Tremendous effort had gone into the second theater of battle, I thought. Far less into the first. So little, in fact, that as I steered south through the land of Lincoln, down a steaming highway dotted with roadkill between Springfield and Centralia, as Amy and Smith slept, my thoughts reached back to a speech the earlier “reformist” King delivered in Chicago, one that challenged and chided me when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964. That speech had looked inward, not out. It emphasized being fully alive in the present, which I found appealing, because didn’t dwelling on the Promised Land or heaven or the Workers’ Paradise postpone full immersion in life to the distant future, so that since the Civil War black people could never be at peace in the present, comfortable with the past, and were waiting, always waiting, for a day of redemption that forever receded like the horizon? Two years earlier King had not spoken that way. He’d said, “When you are behind in a foot race, the only way to get ahead is to run faster than the man in front of you. So when your white roommate says he’s tired and goes to sleep, you stay up and burn the midnight oil.” He spoke from experience, having maintained only a 2.48 grade point average at Morehouse College; by the time he left Crozer Seminary he was student body president and class valedictorian. He talked of his father—who, like old Joe Kennedy, was not an easy father to have—a poor, barely literate boy whose grandfather Jim Long had been used by his master to breed slaves; Daddy King often said, “I came from nowhere.” At age fifteen, he could read but not write. Just the same, determination to win the hand of a Spelman seminary student named Alberta Williams, and to rise in Atlanta’s black world, riveted him to study, “until I was falling asleep saying my lessons to myself.”

  But Chaym Smith was clearly not Daddy King. And he, Amy, and I were the most unlikely of teams with a task so impossible that the thought of it kept my Protestant stomach perpetually cramped, knotted, and queasy from the moment King asked us to work together.

  Beside me, Smith—our Melchizedek—dozed. I noticed that the muscles around his mouth and eyes had relaxed, and for the time he was submerged in himself, in that depthless place of dreamless sleep where we spend a third of our lives, he looked serene, almost cherubic, the contours of his cheeks rounded, all the tension in his normally furrowed brow gone, as if a fire somewhere in him had been extinguished. In dreamless sleep, a king was not a king, nor a pauper poor; no one was old or young, male or female, cursed or blessed, educated or ignorant, sinner or saint. (And even in our dreams, there was no apartheid, no segregation between black and white.) This was the face, very Apollonian, I associated most closely with the minister in old photos I’d seen of him when he was a boy who loved to sing “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus” and sat rapt with attention behind the pulpit of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Church and his father stood ramrod straight, preaching with one finger pointed toward heaven. Or in other pictures from 1951 when he happily posed, like a prince who knew a great kingdom awaited him, beside the stately presence of his mother, with just the slightest sprinkling of pimples on his forehead and one lone pustule on his left cheek. Smith awoke, caught me glancing sideways at him, and smirked.

  “Like what you see, eh?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look so much like him. Yet you’re so different. Chaym, I didn’t know you were a painter—”

  “Yeah,” he yawned, now looking very Dionysian. “I painted some when I was institutionalized. The doctors thought it’d help me heal. As you can see, I ain’t no famous beauty, nobody’s gonna mistake me for Harry Belafonte, but I was hoping that if I created something beautiful, I could offer that to others. Something that would live after I was gone. A li’l piece of me, you know, that’d endure. Problem was, I was second-rate. Naw, I didn’t say bad. What I did—everything I’ve done—was good. Thing is, being just good don’t get you to heaven. And I’m just too mediocre for hell. God don’t like near misses. Runner-ups and also-rans. Second-best means no banana. Purgatory, I been thinkin’, was designed for people like me … and you.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right. Who’s your daddy?”

  “I … don’t know.”

  “That’s what I figured. You like most of the rest of us. Brothers, I mean. You’re illegitimate. No father prepared the way for you. You want to be among the anointed, the blessed—to belong. I saw that in you the moment we met. Nothing’s worked for you, I can see that. You ain’t never gonna have fame or fortune. Maybe not even a girl. I’ll bet you ain’t had pussy since pussy had you. When you die, it’ll be like you never lived. That’s why I said I think I can help you.”

  “With what?”

  “Your salvation,” he said. “You work real hard at being good, Bishop. Anybody can see you’re a Boy Scout. Square as a Necker’s cube. But you don’t fit. You got to remember that nobody on earth likes Negroes. Not even Negroes. We’re outcasts. And outcasts can’t never create a community. I been to a lot of places and it’s the same everywhere. We’re despised worldwide. You ever thought we might be second-class citizens because generally we are second-rate?”

  I almost slammed on the brakes. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me right. You got to face up to the fact of black—or huma
n—mediocrity damned near across the board. Outside of entertainment and athletics (just another kind of entertainment), we don’t count for shit, boy. Ain’t you never felt that being a Negro means you always got the guilty suspicion you done something wrong but you ain’t sure what? And don’t blame it on bigotry. Nobody believes that tired old excuse anymore. What you got to face, Bishop—hey, watch the road, you’re swerving—is the possibility that we are, as a tribe, descended from the first of two brothers whose best just couldn’t hack it. And, it wasn’t his fault. See, if you check that Bible of yours, you’ll find the world didn’t begin with love. It kicked off with killing and righteous hatred and ressentiment. Envy, I’m saying, is the Negro disease. We got the stain, the mark. Nothing else really explains our situation, far as I can see.”

  It took all my strength to keep from driving right off the road. “That’s insane, it’s certifiably mad—”

  “I been that, sure. Got the papers to prove it. I was crazy as a coot after what happened to Juanita and her kids. But not now. I’ve been on the outside long enough to know that hatred is healthy—even holy—and that until you step away, or they cast you out, you can’t see nothin’ clearly. Truth is, being on the outside is a blessing. Naw, it’s a necessity, if you got any creative spark at all. You know Husserl’s epoché, what that does? No”—he squinted at me—“you probably don’t. And that’s too bad, ’cause the way I see it, the problem with all the fuckin’ anointed and somebody like Abel—his name, according to Philo, means ‘one who refers all things to God’—is that they’re sheep. That’s right, part of the obedient, tamed, psalm-singing herd. They make me sick, every one of ’em. See, I ain’t never been good at group-think. You ever notice how safe and dull and correct they all are? How timid! And unoriginal? How vulgar and materialistic? Call ’em what you want, Christians or Communists or Cultural Nationalists, but I call ’em sheep. Or zombies—that’s what Malcolm X called the Nation of Islam, you know, after he broke away from Elijah, his surrogate daddy. There’s not a real individual in the bunch. No risk-takers, Bishop. No iconoclasts. Nobody who thinks the unthinkable, or is cursed (or blessed) with bearing the cross of a unique, singular identity … except for him.” He paused, kneading his lower lip between his forefinger and thumb; he was thinking, I guessed, of the minister. “Individuality … That scares ’em. In Japan, they got a saying: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. You see what I’m saying? What’s the goal after integration? Shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue? Is that what so many civil rights workers died for? Me, I ain’t studyin’ ’bout integrating with no run-of-the-mill white folks, or black ones either. But that’s how you get to belong, boy—by fitting in and mumbling the party line and keeping your head down and losing your soul, but I think I can save you from that if you let me.”

  I couldn’t believe he was saying these things; I wondered if he meant them (which I couldn’t believe) or if he was playing with me simply to see what I’d say. I mean, the minister had instructed me to help him. At that moment I couldn’t see him as mad. No, I saw him as wicked. Yet he made me recall the minister’s sermon “Transformed Nonconformist,” wherein he railed against the “mass mind,” the cowardice of the herd, and proclaimed, “Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.”

  I said, “Who are you?”

  “I dunno,” Smith replied. “I’m always findin’ that out. I guess I make it up as I go along. Pull off there, I got to pee.”

  I flicked the turn signal and coasted the car off the highway toward a tiny, two-pump station and diner that must have dated back to the Depression. A low, barrel-roofed building, it squatted in the shadow of an abandoned red-brick warehouse. The sign blazoned in black letters across its front said PIT STOP. The exterior, faded green and yellow, looked weathered and washed out in the bright midday sunlight. Taped to one of the diner’s cloudy windows was a cardboard sign announcing the day’s special (DELUXE STEAK SANDWICH—$1.75) beside a campaign poster promoting a Republican candidate for the state senate.

  “Matthew,” said Amy, starting to wake, “why’re we stopping here?”

  “I gotta piss,” said Smith, “and I’m hungry.”

  Squinting at the Pit Stop, knuckling both her eyes, she said, “I think I’ll wait in the car.”

  Smith stepped out, gravel crunching under his shoe. Every ancient warning signal in my head from childhood told me to stay in the car. But I was hungry too. Parked off to one side of the diner was a rust-eaten pickup truck with a gun rack, an English setter tied in the bed, and a GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT sticker on the rear bumper. The dog started barking the moment I shut off the engine, which rattled for a while, then coughed and finally stuttered to a stop.

  I stepped from the Chevelle into a hot shower of sunlight and moved, stiff-rumped and sore, through blistering air toward the door. My heart drew tight. I slowed my step, and stopped Smith at the door.

  “Chaym … I think we should go somewhere else.”

  He arched his back, stretching. “What’s the matter? You afraid they won’t serve us? You go somewhere else. I’m starvin’, and I know my rights.”

  He stepped inside, his head rammed forward, and I followed, my eyes taking only a moment to adjust to the dark, low-ceilinged interior. I began a prayer but the words did not come. The air inside the diner was soured by the smell of grease. Over the stove the ceiling was smoke-grimed, and beneath our feet the once-brown linoleum was scuffed and faded. Five small booths, darkened by use, ran the length of the diner on my right. Slut’s wool had been swept into the corners. A portable fan blew hot air across a long, curving counter. There, an old man, thin and balding and wearing round black-rimmed bifocals clamped over the bulb of his waxy nose, sat on a leather stool, reading an edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that headlined the riot in Chicago. His fingernails were dark with dirt, his chin seemed to drop straight into his neck, the back of which was hacked and leathery, and his overalls hung loose in the crotch. On the other side of the counter a middle-aged woman shaped like the Venus of Willendorf, with hazel eyes in a flat, pale face enveloped by red-blond hair, was topping off his cup with black coffee. The name stitched over the pocket of her stained uniform read ARLENE. When Smith entered they both stopped suddenly and stared. Just stared, as if he and I were spacemen who’d fallen from the stars.

  “You bet’ be open for business now,’ said Smith. “We come a long way …”

  Arlene’s head made an infinitesimal bob, but she was still pouring steaming hot coffee—beyond the rim of the old man’s cup and along the porcelain counter, where it spilled onto his narrow lap and squeezed a whoop out of him that so startled her the pot fell clattering from her fingers to the floor. She scrambled to clean up the mess. Smith made a nasty chuckle, relishing every moment of confusion our appearance had caused.

  “You hear what I said?” he asked. “Can we get served?”

  Arlene was still staring. “I guess I can wait on you.” She had one of those roosterish, unmusical American voices, coarsened by years of smoking Camel straights, full of cracks and cackle. “The owner, he’s not here. Are you …”

  “Am I what?”

  She pointed toward the newspaper in front of the old man, who was swabbing his wet crotch with a fistful of napkins, to a front-page, above-the-crease photograph of King in a Chicago poolroom surrounded by admiring teenagers as he leaned over the green felt of a pool table, lining up the cue for his shot. Arlene said, “Him. Is that you?”

  “No.” Abruptly, he was very quiet.

  “Really? You look just like him.”

  “I’m not him,” Smith said angrily, and the saying of it seemed to knock the wind out of him, as if he’d been asked that a thousand times, and each time whoever asked was disappointed, making him feel like an impostor, less than the real McCoy. He lifted one of the leather-bound menus stacked on the counter next to displays of can
dy and fresh pies, and studied it as the old man, dripping, scurried out. Arlene continued to gawk at us.

  “I want four specials for me’n my friends, to go. You got a bathroom here?”

  “Outside, around the back. You know, I almost asked for your autograph—”

  “You still want it?”

  “Well, if you were him, I might, but—”

  Smith walked out before she finished.

  Arlene blinked, pushing a limp, lawless lock of hair, dampened by the heat, off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No,” I said, “he’s just sensitive about his looks.”

  “Well, the way he left, you’d think I called him a name. He does look like that colored preacher, the one causin’ all the big to-do up in Chicago. I wanted his autograph ’cause he’s in the paper all the time, but that don’t mean I like how he’s stirrin’ things up. I get along with colored just fine, but that Dr. Coon—”

  “King,” My stomach heaved. “His name is King.”

  “Whatever, I just think he’s pushin’ things too fast.” She took a deep breath. “You go ’head and sit down. I can serve you since you’re gonna take it out. I’ll have your order in a minute.”

  She stepped to the freezer, took out four hamburger patties that looked as if they’d just thrown off a lingering illness, and dropped them into a skillet on the grill. My belly was still knotted. I’d wanted to slap her, but I remembered how my mother told me to behave in public, and how polite and civilized and patient the minister was himself—always a credit to the race—when confronting white people with an I.Q. the size of their shoes. I tried not to hate her. At the spot where she’d been leaning on the counter when we entered there was a copy of a movie star magazine beside a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray packed with butts bearing the imprint of incisors I’d noticed were stained brown by nicotine when she opened her mouth. In fact, she’d tried to keep her hand over her mouth when speaking to conceal an overbite and the tartar and decay on her front teeth. With her back to the counter, I could see a blemish on her neck from cheap, dimestore jewelry.