Dreamer

by Charles Johnson

  Back on the phone, asking the others in the room to hold the noise down, the minister said, “You can be here then? We need everyone now to help …”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “We’ll be there by morning.”

  Although uneventful, the ride north took longer by two hours because the Chevelle blew a fan belt outside Centralia, and I had to hike to a service station, buy a replacement, then walk back to the car. Smith rode in back with Amy, wearing one of the minister’s dark blue suits, his patterned tie, and clockface cufflinks. From head to toe he was as immaculate as the minister himself when he attended Morehouse and was affectionately known as Tweed. As spit-shined as King felt he had to be at Crozer to bury the stereotype of the Negro as slovenly. Just hours earlier, Amy’d packed his hair with Murray’s Pomade so the waves stood out in neat little rows; she’d creamed his face with Nadinola to clear up a few of his pimples, and he’d splashed on some of the minister’s favorite aftershave lotion, Aramis. On the whole, Smith looked uncomfortable in a suit, with a starched white collar squeezing his throat. And perhaps he was nervous, afraid he would fail at this job he’d petitioned for just as he’d failed at everything else. (And no, we could not keep Smith from strapping on his .357 Magnum, despite my telling him that King, while he did not oppose self-defense, felt edgy if anyone around him wore firearms because years before one of his bodyguards in the South had nearly shot a paperboy.) Amy kept inspecting him, pinching lint off his jacket and from his hair, wetting her handkerchief and rubbing at spots of shaving powder still on his jaw. Surely working so closely with him had been as much a trial for her as it was for me. At the Nest, I noticed that whenever Smith spoke disparagingly about other races—Jews, Chinese, or whites—Amy’s eyes glazed over and grew quiet; they became distant, wall-like, and a sadness fell around her like a scrim. It was not in her nature to make sweeping remarks about any race or group. By the time we returned to the city, Smith, knowing he needed our help, and not wishing to displease her, had shed generalizations of that kind, at least when around Amy.

  Come eight o’clock we were on Edens Expressway. I stopped by a service station, where I called Doc again. He did not want a double standing in during the march. No, that duty was too important to relegate to others. He only wanted us nearby. King was optimistic, upbeat. But when the hour of the demonstration arrived, as the temperature climbed to the eighties and I pulled in behind other vehicles entering Gage Park, I felt his decision to keep us on the sidelines was a tactical error.

  Smith, fingering a carbuncle on his forehead, saw the crowd first and muttered, “Damn! This ain’t no way to wage a fuckin’ war!” Six hundred Negroes and their white supporters from all walks of life, including the clergy, were gathered on the grass, supported by twelve hundred policemen. Over a thousand angry residents waited, itching for trouble, hooting racial insults and waving flags bearing the Nazi swastika and handwritten signs proclaiming THE ONLY WAY TO END NEGROES IS EXTERMINATION. Tension in the air was thick enough to make me short-winded. The mood was carnival-like—but this circus was from Gehenna, with the sort of gaiety you’d expect from townfolk turning out for the year’s biggest lynching, eagerly awaiting more excitement than they could see that summer at a hundred Riverviews. I stepped out of the Chevelle for a moment carrying a two-way radio to keep in contact with Amy, sweat streaming inside my clothes, down my back, and into my shoes. I prayed that King would come to his senses, change his mind, and stay in the white compact car ahead of us. If he’d ever needed conclusive evidence that the SCLC was out of its element, the swelling mob of young, working-class, Nordic-looking white males in sweaty T-shirts, or with their shirts tied around their throats, straining against the police to get their hands on the marchers—he damned well had that proof now. Down South, they were accustomed to crowds of maybe fifty or seventy. Violent whites were few, a minority of rabble-rousers easily rousted by federal troops. But here? Oh, here they came pouring from their homes in waves, the young and the old, healthy and infirm, Polish, Germans, and Italians who fought among themselves constantly but today were bonded by blood against a common foe determined, they believed, to take away their precious homes. The boys had greasy, slicked-back hair and packs of cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves at shoulder level like refugees from movies starring Marlon Brando and Sal Mineo. One, with his cap turned backward, could have been Leo Gorcey. Others wore dark sunglasses. Cowboy hats. Handkerchiefs were wrapped as headbands across their brows. Watching them as they poured into the park, some riding on the shoulders of others in order to see and shouting, We want King!, I realized they had come far better prepared than Doc’s people. Cherry bombs, difficult to distinguish from gunfire, exploded around the Chevelle and King’s car as we inched forward into a sea of urban thugs. Rotten eggs splattered the Chevelle’s windshield, coating it so I couldn’t see and started swearing when my wipers failed to work. I turned the car over to Amy and scrambled out into the crowd, hoping to get closer to the minister’s car. On my left, good white Catholics spit in the faces of priests and nuns committed to civil rights. My heart was hammering. Now I knew why Smith had said we—Negroes—were despised worldwide, for we had done nothing to this crowd. Nothing to earn such revulsion and violence. In fact, there was something biblical, mythic, and ritualistic in their hatred of their darker brothers, something in the blood, as if to found and sustain a city, a sacrificial slaughter must take place. Beer-bellied white men, cigars tucked in the corners of their mouths, screamed for King’s appearance and pounded on the park’s grass with baseball bats. Others chanted white power slogans, calling the black marchers (who carried signs that read HOW LONG? and OPEN UP CHICAGO!) monkeys. They shouted, “Where’s Martin Luther Coon!” and “Kill the nigger-lovers!” at cops who to their astonishment found themselves faced off (Matthew 10:34-39) against their own cousins, sisters, and in-laws.

  Into this chaos stepped King.

  He emerged from his car into a shower of spit, rocks, beer bottles, and firecrackers. For just an instant I saw fear and bewilderment flicker across his face. No, for this he was not ready. This might well be his day to yield up the ghost. Certainly it would be the longest, most treacherous walk of his career. He was completely surrounded by enemies, the forces of Gog and Magog, people he did not know but who believed they knew him, and what they knew they hated enough to kill. Christ had never encountered rabid crowds like this at Golgotha. Enveloping him on all sides—like devils in a circle of hell created for him alone—twisted white lips spewed obscenities, white fingers clawed through the crowd to tear at his tailored blue suit. Out of nowhere a brick came singing through the air. Dazed, he dropped to his knees. Immediately Jesse Jackson and other Movement lieutenants drawn from the Vice Lords and Saints threw themselves between King and the crowd, forcing his head down until the injured philosopher stopped seeing double, rose again to his feet, rocking a little back and forth on his heels, and whispered more to himself than anyone else, “I’m all right, don’t worry about me. I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it. This is what we wanted. Keep moving …”

  They pushed deeper down streets packed with hysterical white homeowners. Reporters and cameramen from the conservative Tribune and Daily News darted around them, wearing protective helmets and keeping their heads ducked. King, dwarfed on all sides, blood and sweat spangling his brow, pulled off his tie; he unbuttoned the top of his shirt, and did not so much walk as he was carried forward by the crowd inside a girdle of gang members, all sworn to nonviolence, who hove close to the sidewalks, providing a flesh-and-blood barrier for the minister’s troops to march in rows of eight on pavement hot enough to fry an egg. Then: over the heads of the crowd I saw a knife hurtling toward the minister. The blade, missing King entirely, buried itself in a bystander. The blue-helmeted police saw nothing. They were dodging rocks and debris, hitting the ground en masse, incapable of holding back hecklers whose numbers swelled to five thousand as the marchers stepped over broken glass and at last reached t
heir destination, the Halvorsen agency at 3145 West 63rd Street. There, beneath the company’s sign (REAL ESTATE INSURANCE sales management appraisals), in front of its long glass window, King, rubbing his forehead, kneeled down to pray.

  Amy’s voice crackled over my radio. “Matthew, I can’t see anything from here! What’s going on?”

  “They’re heading back your way,” I said. “Get Chaym into Doc’s car—”

  “What?”

  “Just do it!”

  Somehow the marchers safely retraced their steps to Marquette Park. In the bedlam of chartered buses and automobiles tearing away, wrecked cars tipped on their sides, their leather interiors blazing, we switched Smith and the minister; Doc rode hunched down in the backseat of the Chevelle to his flat on the West Side, and Smith traveled in the car in which King had come, a gang of whites chasing after him with sticks until the driver put pedal to metal and left them in a cloud of carbon monoxide.

  Within minutes of our arrival at South Hamlin Street, no sooner than I had the minister upstairs and Smith back in the Chevelle out of sight with Amy in an alleyway, the apartment and hallway filled with Movement workers, all maneuvering to get the minister’s attention. At the kitchen table he sat still shaking from his most recent brush with death, his suitcoat draped over the chair behind him, his shirtcuffs bunched up to his elbows, tie unbraided, and his head canted left as a young woman with skinny legs washed the wound on his forehead, then smoothed a Band-Aid just above and to the right of his eyebrow. While she ministered to him, smacking him lightly on the shoulder when he moved, he smoked cigarettes end-on-end and talked steadily to his captains in the packed room in which two weeks earlier I’d introduced him to Smith.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.” His eyes squeezed shut for a second; the blow to his temple had brought on the worst headache he’d felt in years. “We’ve been in demonstrations all over the South—Mississippi, Alabama—but I’ve never seen mobs as full of hate or as hostile as the ones we saw today. Nothing like this!”

  One of his staff members, a lean minister standing to his left, agreed. “There is a bright side. The boys you picked from the gangs to be march captains acquitted themselves pretty well.”

  “Yes … yes, you’re right. I saw a couple of them with broken noses and bruises”—he rubbed his own nose—“but none of them struck back. Lord, I hope the reporters put that in the newspapers. It proves the opposite of what they’ve been saying—what Daley and J. H. Jackson said about demonstrations igniting violence on our side.”

  I interrupted, wanting to tell him about our last two weeks with Smith. But the instant I called his name, he cut me off.

  “Matthew, I didn’t see you standing there! Do you have a minute? There’s something I must speak alone with you about, if you don’t mind.”

  He grabbed his coat and squeezed through a crush of people in the hallway, leading me into the bathroom, then closed the door, which muffled the chattering and constantly ringing phone outside. The minister lowered himself onto the covered toilet seat and, fumbling inside his coat pocket, looked up.

  “Sometimes this is the only room where I can go to get a little peace and quiet.”

  “I understand, sir.” (And I did: his namesake, Martin Luther, was reported to have experienced illumination while seated on the throne of Denmark.)

  “I’m pleased by how you’ve handled your project. After the demonstration those hooligans took off after him, not us, and he didn’t suffer a scratch. You know, with a little more work this can become a great institution.”

  King located what he wanted in his coat. An envelope containing five one-hundred-dollar bills for Smith’s first month. We’d agreed cash payments would replace checks. There would be no paper trail. No trace of his alter ego’s existence.

  “He does favor me, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir—even more now than before.”

  “Do you have other plans for him tonight?”

  “Tonight?” I looked at my wrist, realized I didn’t have a watch on and was staring at skin, but not knowing what else to do I looked for a full three seconds anyway.

  “Around seven, yes,” Doc said. “I’d like to send him out to a Negro church in the suburbs—Calvary AME—to pick up an award they’re giving me. Do you think he can do that?”

  “I’m not … sure. This was his first day … You can’t be there?”

  “Oh, maybe, if things settle down here. I’ll do my best to get away, but I’d like Chaym there just in case. He won’t have to give a speech or anything. Just shake hands and say thank you. Do you think he can handle this? I’d hate to disappoint the parishioners at Reverend Coleman’s church who invited me.”

  “We can try,” I said.

  Then he wanted to use the bathroom. Stepping back into the hallway, I saw Amy by the front door, not downstairs at the car where I’d left her and asked specifically that she take care of Chaym. I could tell she’d been crying. I led her outside to the stairs, away from the others, and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Chaym kicked me out of the car. Matthew, he can be terrible sometimes!” Amy leaned into my shoulder and cried a little more. I closed my eyes, inhaling her perfume, feeling her fingers on my chest, her belly against mine. Instinctively, as I held my breath, both my hands lifted to pull her closer, but I resisted that impulse, and simply stood motionless until she was cried out and moved away, wiping her eyes. “Sometimes I’d like to hit him, except it’d feel like hitting Dr. King.”

  “Okay,” I said, “what’s bothering him? Everything went perfectly.”

  “Yes, but it’s not what he wants now. He says we’re treating him like a clay pigeon. A decoy. Chaym says he’s better than that, as good as King any day, and he wants a chance to prove it.”

  “Maybe he’s got it.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll explain later. You said he’s still in the car?”

  “Last time I looked, but—”

  I was halfway down the stairs before she finished, pushing through a crowd at the door and SCLC workers holding them back. I circled round the block to where we’d left the Chevelle, but I was thinking of Amy, how warm and soft she’d felt in the crook of my arm. I’d wanted badly to hold her. Problem was, the fool I’d made of myself in the farmhouse was green in my memory, and I decided I could be satisfied with just being there, asking for nothing, if she needed my shoulder, or a hand to hold, or someone to listen. Outcasts, I’d learned from Chaym (though perhaps he failed at this himself), learned not to ask for much, yet were there if the Abelites were in need.

  I walked up behind the Chevelle and saw Smith so absorbed in what he was doing he failed to hear my footsteps approaching. He was rummaging, I realized, through his suitcoat. Then he found what he was looking for. A small case containing a hypodermic needle wrapped in cotton. Smith tore off his coat, unbuttoned the left cuff of his shirt, and rolled back the sleeve. He jabbed his fingers along the length of his forearm, found a likely spot, and held the needle up, pushing out its air bubble. I watched him lick a spot on his forearm wet and shiny with spittle; then he broke skin with the needle and, his eyes heavily lidded, he watched thin fluid vanish from the needle into his vein.

  He replaced the needle in its case, put that in the jacket pocket, dropped his head back on the car’s vinyl seat, and let his tortured mind dream. For a long time I did not move; I did not wish to interrupt him, for without dreams, even drug-induced ones, all a black man has left are nightmares. After I got hold of myself, I walked to his window and knocked with my knuckles on the glass.

  “Doc says he needs us tonight. You up for that, Chaym?”

  He sniffed and nodded. “I’m good.”

  “I’ll bet. Can you accept an award for him?”

  “Hell yeah, I’m ready to do anything.”

  “You want to talk?”

  “What the fuck about? You wanna talk to somebody, Bishop, go to confession.”

  I let that ride, easing onto
the front seat beside him, resolving to say nothing of what I’d seen to either Doc or Amy. As long as he could do the job, and cover the minister’s back if a gig went sour, who was I, after all, to cast the first stone?

  7

  Calvary AME Church, a pitched-roof, redbrick building with two lancet-arched doorways and a blue and white sign swinging from its southwest edge on the corners of Emerson and Darrow streets in the quiet, progressive suburb of Evanston, was plain and inconspicuous enough for travelers to completely miss—like so much in the black world—if they weren’t looking for it. Its rich, never recorded history was hidden inside, stored within every parishioner, or so Amy said that evening after the Marquette march as we sped down the Outer Drive, crossing bustling Howard Street into a sleepy suburb quite different from south or west Chicago. The riots and agony of marching in the city had largely bypassed the cultural island of Evanston. Most black residents were too busy making a living and caring for their children to take a day off for civil disobedience, though they cared deeply about the Movement’s northern campaign and cheered King, the rebel messiah, the almost paradoxical fusion of Cain and Abel, when the Chicago campaign put into practice his ingenious method of “creative tension” aimed at disrupting the status quo by forcing long-buried hatreds to surface, where they were exposed for the world to see. King’s philosophy notwithstanding, “creative tension” was an act of violence, the murder of a repressive past so that a new order—God’s order—could be born. Yet Evanston, while not the fabled Promised Land, was a curious pocket of tranquillity compared to the Black Belt. There, residents could walk safely at night from one end of town to the other. Liquor was not sold—for that you had to drive to Skokie. There were white millionaires, blue-collar black homeowners bonded by church affiliations, an integrated school system, stores and movie theaters (three), and some years the best public high school in the nation. (However, the school superintendent did demand parental permission on both sides before he would condone interracial dating.)