Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  After I worked with Smith all morning and afternoon on the broad themes and tropes in the ministers speeches, and the four levels of meaning in the Bible (literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogic), and helped him design for himself a daily program of lectio divina, stretching the envelope of his mind and imagination, he enlisted Amy to work on his body. He knew, of course, exactly what he wanted from us. At the temple, Smith said, he’d learned to read Sanskrit in three days of study and chanting sutras. He asked Amy, who’d been a drama student, to help him with exercises to control the vocal centers—the abdomen, chest, lower and upper throat, and sinus cavity. He had me give him a close-to-the-skull haircut.

  Then he proceeded to study, for fifty-minute intervals (as monks do with mandalas), and with all his senses imaginatively put into play, color photographs of Kings birth home (sold to Rev. Williams in 1909 for the price of $3,500) at 501 Auburn Avenue N.E. in Atlanta. With these pictures spread out before him on the farmhouse floor, he imaginatively climbed the four steps to the door and worked to feel everything in the images, bringing forth an emotional association for the umbrella box, high-backed chair, and table with a bouquet of flowers in the entryway; feel his way past the sliding doors to the piano with its low bench, which had one wobbly leg, the fireplace, the rocker, and different games—Old Maid and Monopoly—the King children played beside the old-fashioned radio in the parlor; feel himself walking the hardwood floors from the parlor to the tiny first-floor bathroom where Martin as a boy hid from his father’s switch and to avoid the unmanly chore of doing the dishes (he preferred to haul coal for the furnace to the cramped, low-ceilinged basement); he moved on to the kitchen with its Hossier cabinets and icebox containing a frozen block weighing ten pounds. From the kitchen window he worked to see the vacant lot the King children often played in and where once a year the circus, featuring clowns and acrobats and sweet cones of colored ice, threw up its tents. He ascended to the second floor, where he could view from the stairhead, one hand resting on the smooth railing, the window Martin used to leap from to impress girls passing by, and at age twelve hurled himself from with suicidal intent after hearing of “Mama” Jennie Williams’s fatal heart attack in 1941 when he had sneaked away to sin by going to the circus. He let his gaze travel to the guestroom (far left) set aside by King Senior for the endless stream of visiting ministers who stayed at their home; then on to his grandmother’s bedroom (there Martin was born), and next to that the boy’s playroom, where Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, coloring books, and Chinese checkers were scattered along the floor, and to feel too the height of the second-floor ceiling which Daddy King, who was only five-six, touched with his fingertips when he learned of Martin’s birth and literally jumped for joy. (Martin, we informed Smith, was originally named Michael King Jr. after his father, who was also christened Michael and then later, like his son, replaced that name with Martin.) We could see that this exercise was excruciating for Chaym Smith. He’d lived in an orphanage. On the streets. Each detail in the photos reinforced for him the staggering inequities of personal fortune. Little wonder that King leaned more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature. Toward the end of this session, as Smith came back downstairs and out to the front porch, giving himself a clear image of the German store down the street, owned by the father of Martin’s two best friends, and just across the street, over the neatly trimmed shrubs in the Kings’ yard, the shotgun shacks and alley apartments housing the black poor only fifty feet from Daddy King’s front door—at the end, Smith was shaken. He said, “I woulda given anything for a loving, decent childhood like that. Parents like that.” He peered up to me, but his eyes were still filled with all he’d seen. “Bishop, it ain’t right not having anybody who cared …”

  Amy thought it best to put the photos away.

  That night he slept longer than usual, his dreams peopled with King family principals. Loving folk such as Smith himself had never known. We did not wake him. He stumbled from his bedroom a little before noon, still bitter, but said, “What’re y’all staring at me for? Let’s get to work.” In Chicago, King had given us several articles of his clothing: pointed black shoes, a shirt from Zimmerman’s in Atlanta, black shin-high nylon socks, a brown passport holder bearing the inscription CITY OF LONDON, HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT, and Ruskin’s book Unto This Last. These I gave to Smith. The clothing was a near-perfect fit. After a light lunch, he turned to copying lines from one of King’s recorded speeches, “A Knock at Midnight,” isolating the metaphoric logic behind the comparisons King drew, some of which Smith found severely wanting in poetic value (“the cataract of sin,” “the virus of pride”); he sneered, “I can do better than that,” then plunged on to scan passages (“Not only is it midnight in man’s collective life but it’s midnight in his individual life, it’s midnight in the psychological order …”) so his emphasis would vary as little as possible from the original.

  To his credit and our incredulity, he absorbed the information we fed him like a sponge. But then again, the task was not as daunting as it might seem, given his long, painful twelve-year obsession with the nation’s most prominent preacher, and his own unusual gifts. Little by little, he learned that if there was a single philosophical law to the minister’s life, an essence, it was embodied in three profound ideals. First, the deeper meaning of nonviolence, not merely as a strategy for protest, but as a Way, a daily praxis men must strive to translate into each and every one of their deeds. This Smith understood and compared to the Sanskrit word ahimsa, from himsa (“to injure”) and a (“no” or “not”), so that in its fullness King’s moral stance implied noninjury to everything that exists. Second, agape, the ability to love something not for what it presently was (which might be quite unlovable, like George Wallace) but for what it could be, a teleological love that recognized everything as process, not product, and saw beneath the surface to a thing’s potentiality. And last, the fact of integration as the life’s blood of Being itself. As I explained this to Smith, it struck me that these were not separate ideals at all, only different sides of a single meditation nearly as old as humanity, a meditation that could be lapped and folded in as few as three words:

  Others first.

  Always.

  That was the vision; everything else was mere detail. (Though the Devil, as always, was in the details.)

  Nights, when he slept, crashing into unconsciousness, Smith placed close by his mattress a tape recorder that all night long softly played Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, “Moonlight” Sonata, Mahalia Jackson, and compositions by Harry T. Burleigh. Awakening the next day at 5 A.M., his eyes puffy, he put aside his razor, substituting for it the distinctly black ritual of shaving with the smelly depilatory powder (“Magic”) used by the minister and, if truth be told, millions of black men with sensitive skin. It lit up the farmhouse with a smell like sulfur or eggs gone south after he mixed it with cold water, spread it on his face with a spatula, let it harden for five minutes, then scraped it off. But it wasn’t enough for Smith to shave like King; he elected to eat as he did too, having Amy fix meals of the minister’s favorite dishes—turnip greens, bacon drippings, and cornbread (food, King once confessed, was his greatest sin). I helped in the kitchen, reading to Amy from Mama Pearl’s recipes, and shared with her the chore of washing (me) and drying (Amy) her family’s plates, silverware, and pots after dinner. But no, I did not approach her again with my affections. I was even careful, when handing her a plate for drying, to keep two feet of distance between us, and I was at pains not to bump into her or touch her without her permission, or look at her for too long, or do anything that would make her uncomfortable or remember how clumsily I’d cast my heart at her feet only to have her step around it like roadkill.

  No doubt my behavior baffled her (which was nothing new). Like so many in the Movement, Amy was strong, serious, sure of herself and what things meant in the world. She was an Abelite, lost to ambiguity. I cannot lie; I loved her still. I’d believed that as Aquinas, tha
t intractable Aristotelian, put it, a pious woman might lead a man to the Lord. Saint John of the Cross said it just as well, amado con amada. She might be his salvation, if he wedded his will to hers. (Clearly, this worked for King’s father.) But I knew my love would never be returned. This asymmetry was not entirely unsatisfying. Because of Smith, I began to accept the sad inevitability of myself. With not being able to take sides (when one’s choices were miserable). With the mark of loneliness, ipseity, Socratic doubts, interiority, and always having an afterthought. I felt at ease with (and less apologetic for) my bookishness, my inclination toward irony, and my sense that the world as it was, was unacceptable; I’d settled on the fact that perhaps I lived best as a witness who withdrew and gained distance in order to become truly engaged. Still, I recognized something I loved in the community of the certain, the blessed, but thanks to Smith I hankered for it a little less than before and knew that whatever liberation I might look forward to was in my hands alone.

  And there is also this to say:

  I began to fear we were being watched. Although I said nothing to the others, late some nights a plain green Plymouth rolled up the road toward the farmhouse. Its headlights were off. The driver sat for long minutes, and I saw smoke spiraling up through one side window. We were miles from town; I wondered: Who would come this far? Whenever I rose from bed and ran barefoot to the road, the Plymouth’s engine started, and the car was gone before I got there, nothing remaining of its presence except tire marks and black dottle from someone’s pipe.

  As I said, I did not want to frighten the others. Instead, I asked Smith to walk with me, just to get him away from his regimen of reading, to Giant City State Park, through the enclosure known as the Stone Fort, which once served as a site for Indian ceremonial purposes at the top of an eightyfoot stone cliff. As we walked I tried to convey capsule descriptions of existentialist theologians germane to the minister’s intellectual genesis, and what little I’d gleaned from a hasty perusal of Edgar Brightman. Of Personalism there was precious little to say. Had King not written about its value to him in reinforcing his belief in a loving, divine Father on high when he was in college (in contrast to Paul Tillich’s monistic, impersonal God as the “Ground of Being”), Personalism as a philosophy would be as dead as Neoplatonism. None of the abstract portraits of the Lord offered by Tillich, Plotinus, Spinoza, or Eastern mystics could satisfy a Baptist preacher’s boy. Thus the Boston Personalists, and Crozer professor L. Harold DeWolf’s conception of a self-limited, temporal Father who bore man’s face and flaws, hopes and values, impacted on Kings vision more than any other; if Martin imagined the Lord, the odds were good that He looked (and behaved) more than a little like Daddy King. For DeWolf, God was immersed in creation, His power willingly curtailed by human freedom. He was not a prescient deity. His holiness was entangled in the bloody advance of history. Future events unfolding in this intentionally less than best of all possible worlds might take Him by surprise. He did not will suffering. Evil on earth was beyond his control, but in the Father’s contract with His children, evil was an opportunity for spiritual growth and triumph. The Devil could not prevail, for as man struggled from innocence through sin to redemption he waged a war on His behalf to realize history’s goal of the Heavenly City, the kingdom. King, I explained, accepted some restrictions on God’s power, but could not—would not—believe for a second that He lacked absolute control of events predestined to lead to social liberation and the beloved community.

  On our way back to the Nest, tramping along quietly at my side with his hands folded across his midsection (a carry-over from his temple training, the position known as shashu, “forked hands”), his brow furrowed, Smith was brooding. Out of the corner of my eye, I checked him, uneasy by how now he seemed more like the minister than before. “I’m starting to see something,” he said. “Martin don’t hold back nothing for himself.” We tramped on, his silence freighted as he wrestled with his thoughts. “He’s about total surrender, giving it all to God. I been trying to get a handle on him, but sometimes it’s like he ain’t there. Like he’s an instrument, not the music itself—a conduit for something else that’s always just outta my reach.”

  “Do you have faith?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I said, do you have faith, Chaym?”

  “Naw.” His brow tightened. “None. How could I? If you’re saying that’s why I’ve got the shell but not the substance, fuck you, Bishop. There’s nothing but shell, far as I can see. And I’m ready now. You understand? I can do anything he does. Just watch me—and I’ll fucking do it better.”

  The call from Doc came on August 4.

  Routinely, I’d driven into Carbondale to phone the Lawndale flat, report on Smith’s progress, and keep abreast of the campaign in Chicago. The minister, whose voice was flat and tired, as if he could barely stay awake, asked if we could return for the Marquette march. In the background I heard arguing, voices I could not identify, but the heart of this contentious discussion seemed to center on the escalating backlash against King’s lieutenants, some of them having picketed real estate agencies in the Belmont-Cragin area, and for their trouble saw their parked cars set on fire. SCLC and CCCO workers were at the end of their patience. When King was away, Andrew Young and Al Raby led fifteen hundred demonstrators (they were still falling far short of the turnout they needed) into an Irish-Lithuanian neighborhood near Marquette Park on July 30. The marchers were heckled by residents waving Confederate flags and homemade signs reading NIGGER, HOW YOU WISH YOU WERE WHITE and SEGREGATION IS GOD’S PLAN. Their parked cars were pushed into a lagoon. Predictably, the Chicago police were no help whatsoever. Their cousins and kin lived in these all-white enclaves; after pushing irate white residents into wagons with CENTRAL DETENTION SERVICE labeled on their rear doors they drove them a few blocks away and set them free. Those neighborhoods were explosive, someone in the rundown flat told King. A powder keg waiting to be lit. The minister excused himself, asking me to hold, and I heard him say he agreed the moment was right for confrontation.

  Waiting in a phone booth at a rural filling station six hours away from the city, I realized that our weeks downstate, away from newspapers and televisions, had thrown me out of step with the breathless pace of King’s northern campaign. Chicago was still reeling from the riots. The monolith of de facto segregation had barely budged an inch. Blacks were squeezed into ten percent of the city’s area, with only four percent living in the suburbs, where homes ran as high as $15,000. The CCCO, which gave priority to changing inferior education over economic boycotts, was battling to oust despised emblems of segregation in the schools like superintendent Benjamin C. Willis and a high school principal named Miss Chuchut. Yet despite setbacks by Democratic precinct ward-organizers who threatened the poor with loss of their welfare payments if they voted or protested, a degree of progress had been made. Using as their model the tactics of Philadelphia’s Rev. Leon Sullivan, King’s forces created a local chapter of Operation Breadbasket and designated as its director a University of Chicago theology student named Jesse Jackson in a move that ruffled the feathers of more than a few older activists, but the bold young minister did bring home the bacon when a boycott led to better employment for blacks with the Country Delight Dairy chain.

  Nevertheless, too little had changed in a campaign that noisily blew into town promising to bring down the walls of economic racism once and for all. Real estate agencies were making a killing off white flight from neighborhoods that in just months turned completely black. Gun sales soared in Slavic districts, and I wondered, as the minister must have wondered, if it was possible to end social evil through actions that did not themselves engender a greater, more devastating evil. Back in 1954, the newspapers had labeled the Montgomery Improvement Association’s nonviolent bus boycott “Gandhian.” The Movement picked up the phrase later, and King was fond of saying Jesus provided the message, Gandhi the method for their social mission. But this was not entirely true. Nor,
strictly speaking, faithful to Gandhi, who claimed his greatest ambition was “To make myself zero.” When asked for the secret of his life, the mahatma replied, Tena tyaktena bhunjithah (“Renounce and enjoy”). Howard University activists appropriated the approach of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 1940s, when King was still in college. His version derived from theirs, the Howard leaders who took the body but not necessarily the soul of the mahatma’s method, the surface but not the deepest impulse to renounce materialism and egotism in all their manifestations. Far from being anchored in the dualism of the Christian book, Gandhi’s methods drew from the Bhagavad Gita, which taught him, he insisted, that “those who desire salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” Selfless, humble, detached, living without privacy so that his life was perfectly transparent, seeking no personal gain or profit, indefatigable, Gandhi could meet any social conflict head-on for those he loved, and his intention was never to humiliate or beat down his opponent. How to end evil without engendering error or evil. The question had apparently slowed down Howard’s activists and the SCLC and the CCCO not at all.