Smith and I did not say.
“Thing is, me’n Vincent can’t figure how he can be so red when Daddy King is a capitalist. And what about that fellah A. G. Gaston, the black insurance man who paid five thousand to bail King out of jail in Birmingham? Gaston’s worth ten mil. He says the Wall Street Journal is his Bible, and he published a book called Green Power, arguing that money was the key to solving the race problem. You’d think the Reverend woulda noticed how even he depended on creative free enterprise, right?”
“What in God’s name”—Smith squinted at Groat—“do you people want?”
“A li’l cooperation,” said Groat. “For Dr. King’s sake. Anybody can see he’s over the edge. The seeds were in his personality from the beginning. A domineering father. Guilt feelings from his privileged status as a famous preacher’s son. The sense that he had a racial mission—a destiny—to fulfill, that he was personally responsible for eliminating the world’s suffering. Messiah complex. Maybe his being so short figures in too. And there’s hypersensitivity to how others saw him, like at Crozer when he overdressed and wouldn’t go to class unless his clothes were immaculately pressed, his shoes perfectly shined, and he was, he says, morbidly conscious of being a minute late because he felt any lapse in perfection confirmed negative Negro stereotypes. He never fails to check the polls ranking colored leaders to make sure he’s there, preferably in first place. We’re talking about an Alpha male determined to leave his mark on the world, even if it’s a burn mark from scorching a city. Somebody who’d sacrifice children, for God’s sake, on the front lines of a demonstration in order to impose his will on a community. This country deserves a better—a more balanced—black leader than that. Somebody responsible, like Roy Wilkins or that attorney Samuel R. Pierce Jr. Did you see the Time article on King when they selected him as Man of the Year? If you haven’t, you might want to read that. They point out how Wilkins is sharper than King, he’s a better organizer at the NAACP, and that’s one of the minister’s worst problems—organization—which is why he has to keep an old homosexual red like Rustin around. James Farmer at CORE, they said, is more militant, SNCC’s leader John Lewis has King beat for militancy, Whitney Young Jr.’s got it all over him for sophistication, and he’ll never write a line that’d stand beside James Baldwin’s prose. Right about now, I’d say, he’s more of a liability to the civil rights movement than an asset. Truth is, I figure he’s even dangerous to himself. Now, that wasn’t always so. Once upon a time he was a damned good leader. Do you remember that talk he gave on some things colored people should do, oh, back in fifty-eight, I believe. I’ve got a copy of it right here.”
“We don’t need to see that,” Smith said.
And we didn’t.
I remembered it only too well. Few people talked these days about that speech delivered at the Holt Street Baptist Church for the MIA’s Institute on Non-Violence. It had brought the young King great criticism from the black world. He’d said the unspeakable; he’d aired “dirty laundry” and risked, some said, giving ammunition—aid and comfort—to the Movement’s enemies. His intent, of course, had been otherwise. It had been to chase down truth, as he’d always tried to do. The things he assailed that night were, in his view, the products of racism, but that did not mean they could be excused or ignored. Preparing for his trip to India, he asked the gathering at the Holt Street Baptist Church to consider—just consider—the arguments of their worst foes, as Gandhi did those of his adversaries, and if their charges contained any truth, then he urged black people to make sure the race was “ready for integration.” Their enemies in the South said all that Negroes wanted was to marry white women. He dismissed that lunacy with a wave of his hand but then added, “They say that we smell. Well, the fact is some of us do smell. I know most Negroes do not have money to fly to Paris and buy enticing perfumes, but no one is so poor that he can’t buy a five-cent bar of soap.” Then he let go, allowing his blistering sermon to take him where it would, to the things internal to the race that hurt and infuriated him. “We kill each other and cut each other too much!” Our crime and illegitimacy rates, he said, are disproportionately high compared with those of whites. No one, King roared that night, needed to speak good English in order to be good; however, that didn’t excuse schoolteachers who crippled their students with bad grammar. He moved on that evening from target to target, aiming at alcoholism (“The money Negroes spend on liquor in Alabama in one year is enough to endow three or four colleges”); at the conspicuous consumption some blacks saw as “style” (“There are too many Negroes with $2,000 incomes riding around in $5,000 cars”); and even at black physicians more concerned with status symbols than with deepening their knowledge (“Too many Negro doctors have not opened a book since leaving medical school”). Sometimes, he implied, we need to think less about what we should do and more about what we should be. Changing this litany of inherently moral problems, which could not be ignored—and might worsen over time and even threaten the Movement’s progress—was, King said, something within black America’s power then, irrespective of what the federal government did or did not do.
His 1958 sermon had been worthy of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, or Elijah Muhammad (at his best). Sadly, it brought less praise than scathing condemnation from many black people who called him an Uncle Tom. Understandably, the minister gave fewer and fewer of those speeches after the 1950s, though it was this side of King, I realized, that interested these Wise Guys most.
But Wilkins as a potential replacement? That made sense, I supposed. The executive director of the NAACP deeply envied King, often called him a liar, and met with the Bureau’s Cartha DeLoach to discuss their mutual dissatisfaction with King; Wilkins worried that the minister’s escalating conflicts with Hoover, and King damning the FBI for not protecting civil rights workers, would severely impair the Movement’s progress. In fact, Wilkins along with a few other Negro leaders led the effort three years earlier to get King to accept the presidency of a small college or the position of pastor at a large black church in order to retire him as the foremost Negro leader. No, there was no love lost between Wilkins and King, who’d refused the executive director’s offer by saying he knew only too well “the hypocrisy of adulation.”
“What,” I asked, “do you want with us?”
“Like I said, a li’l cooperation. But you don’t have to do a thing, Matthew. You can rest.” He fanned himself with one of his folders. “We know how well you and the Griffith girl brought along Chaym. Know a li’l about his history too. His kin’s from down here originally. On his mother’s side, we can trace his family tree back to a free woman named Baleka Calhoun. She came over in a slave ship before Surrender. Belonged to an African tribe called the Allmuseri. They’re all dead now, of course, or moved on. He’s pretty much the last of his line. Now, what I been thinking is if Zorro—”
“Who?” I said.
A quick, elastic little grin quivered round Groat’s mouth. “Excuse me, I meant to say if Dr. King was to one day lose his standing as a leader, he’d have to retire, now wouldn’t he? And it’d probably be the best thing for him, and for the country—if we saved him from himself, I mean.”
I asked, “How could that happen?”
“It’s something we’d like to discuss with Chaym … alone, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“I think you’d better leave now,” said Smith. “I’m not interested in anything you have to say.”
Groat chuckled and gave Withersby a sideways glance. “We’ll leave, if that’s what you want. But I just want to say that it’d be a shame if somebody decided to reopen the investigation into who killed Juanita Lomax and her kids.”
Withersby added, “Don’t forget that apartment fire on Indiana Avenue.”
“Oh, that’s right! Whoever did that would be facing, oh, what would you say, Vincent?”
“Twenty years, easy.”
Groat gave a headshake and scratched his chin. “Mmhmm. I’d say that.”
/> Smith looked as if his mind had stopped. The line of his lips thickened. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Listen, I was just starting to put my life back together. Right here, in this place—”
“That’s good to hear,” said Groat. “It’s something you could come back to, and with a whole lot more money to help you make it better. Do you think we could take a ride and talk a little more?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Chaym,” I said, “you can’t go with them—”
“Matthew.” Withersby looked square at me. “This doesn’t concern you anymore. The best thing for you to do is go back to Chicago. Maybe get back in school. Or maybe you’d like to think about becoming an agent. I believe you’d be a good one. I could help you with your application, if you like.”
“No, thank you.”
Smith looked at me as a man might if a noose was tied round his neck. “It’s all right, we’re just gonna talk.” Then he laughed, brokenly. “It’s just a li’l karma catching up with me, I guess. Check your Deuteronomy 32:35.”
I followed them to the front door, coming close up behind the Wise Guys just in time to hear Smith asking a question that had bothered me from the beginning. “How long have you been watching us?”
“Since the day you arrived at King’s apartment,” Withersby said. “You know, it’s a shame someone as talented as you has always been in the shadows. But that happens to geniuses, doesn’t it?”
“You think that’s what I am?”
“I know it, Chaym. And we want to help you …”
After they left, squeezing Smith between them on the front seat of their green Plymouth, pulling away at twilight, I sat on the front porch for hours, drinking a six-pack of Budweiser, waiting for them to return. In the distance, darkness began to stain the horizon, the hills, all the farmhouses, and the blue silhouettes of trees were black against the sky. Then it was night, and the world shrank. Was smaller, it seemed to me. Each time I saw a pair of headlights appear on the narrow, root-covered road, I stepped drunkenly into the yard, straining my eyes, only to see those lights pass the farmhouse by. I returned to the porch, starting on a second six-pack. And waited. The more I drank, the more the palpable dread I felt mercifully dulled, but I was unable to shake off Withersby’s words and wanted to shoot him. There was something awful in the way he’d said it, We want to help you, as if he knew well the demons of desire and inadequacy that dwelled within Smith, all those decades of never being appreciated, and was playing him, but for what?
What possible use could these Wise Guys have for the minister’s double? I tore the tab off another beer, drained half its contents, and belched, remembering that leaders like Hitler and Stalin employed stand-ins, and it was rumored that Fidel Castro had a couple of look-alike actors always waiting in the wings to impersonate him. So we had envisioned Smith’s role from the start. But what happened to doubles when the original became expendable, or a liability? I wondered: What if the Wise Guys really had no use for him? No more than they did for King. What if their assignment was to eliminate or discredit the minister—wouldn’t they want to eliminate as well the one capable of standing in during his absence?
By midnight they still had not returned. My stomach felt sour. My thoughts kept twisting, torquing so I could not stay any longer on the porch, listening to the wind whirling leaves and whistling in the treetops. I went inside the empty farmhouse, which seemed desolate and ghostlike, now that Amy was gone for good and, I feared, Smith was gone too. My aimless pacing took me through the front room where he’d devoted himself to studying minutiae of the minister’s life, to the spot in the kitchen where I’d kissed Amy, and finally to the closed door of Smith’s bedroom. I turned the knob, cracking open the door. I stepped inside, clicked on the ceiling light, and sat heavily down on his bed. There in one corner was his dented saxophone. I picked it up, plopped down again on the bed, wet the mouthpiece, and tried to play, producing not the mellow sound he’d conjured from his instrument but instead a blaat! that more resembled breaking wind than melody. No, I would never be a musician.
I returned the horn to its place in the corner, and as I turned around I saw something sticking out from under his bed, barely concealed by the blanket. I got down on one knee, peered under the mattress, and found a cardboard box filled with sketches, some in watercolor, others in charcoal. I spread them on the bed. It had been months since I’d seen his drawings, months in which his heart had subtly begun to change. His earlier pieces, I recalled, had seemed anguished and grotesque, some indebted to George Grosz’s savage depictions of the German bourgeoisie during World War II, except that earlier Smith’s targets were Negroes and American whites who betrayed the dream of the beloved community—race merchants who capitalized on their people’s suffering for personal profit, black thieves who preyed upon the poor unable to escape them in an era of apartheid, and Caucasians so guilt-ridden by the sins of their forebears they lost all reason when blackmailing, professional Race Men accused them of every social crime imaginable; all these players fell beneath Smith’s brutal pen and brushwork, the opportunists, race pimps and profiteers, and bigots whom he always drew dragging their knuckles on the ground like Neanderthals. But these new pages he’d filled, showing them to no one, shoving them under his bed in a cardboard box, were astonishingly different. In some way he’d descended into hell in his earlier work, during his days of exile, facing without flinching the ugliest, most paralyzing features of color and caste and inequality, squeezing them for every drop of pus and corruption they contained. And then, sometime after taking the bullet intended for King (so the dates on his drawings suggested), he’d let that go, released it. His new sketches were simplicity itself: delicate, lovingly detailed studies of the landscape around the farmhouse in different gradations of light. There were at least two dozen wordless meditations on a single ramose tree in the front yard, as if that one object—seen clearly and through no eyes but his own—might reveal the world’s mystery and wonder. He reveled in the play of colors, knowing they did not exist—colors, secondary qualities—outside the miracle of consciousness, which made every one of us (so his notebooks claimed) the magister ludi, the maestro of each moment of perception. I found drawings of Amy so real, so naturalistically rendered, it seemed she had appeared instantaneously, transported from Chicago to Carbondale like the spacemen in a TV series. There were several portraits of me, though I barely recognized myself. Me as he envisioned I might be in a decade, no longer the insecure, callow prop in the background of someone else’s story (or the chronicles of a mass movement) but instead an individual inexhaustible and ineffable in his haecceitas and open-ended promise. I stared and stared at these portraits. I went through all his sketches, studying each carefully, and I came to see that in them Smith had decided that if the world our absent fathers made was hideous, unfair, and unacceptable, a realm where we were condemned, then all right: he would reinvent it from scratch, if need be, in his art and actions.
His notebooks were no less revealing, the yellowed pages bearing his minute transcriptions of verse by Shinkichi Takahasi:
The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.
And from Shinsho:
Does one really have to fret
About Enlightenment?
No matter what road I travel,
I’m going home.
It was dawn before I finished reviewing his sketches and notebooks, and still the green Plymouth had not returned. Exhausted, I fell asleep on his bed, surrounded by drawings, and didn’t wake until late afternoon. I stumbled to the front porch: nothing. No one. And then I began to suspect they had killed him. All day long I watched the road, emptied every bottle and beer can in the kitchen, and turned to the spiral-bound college notebook in which I kept a record of our covert project for the Revolution, catching up on my entries, trying to descr
ibe everything I remembered since the Wise Guys intervened with as much accuracy as I could muster, though even as I wrote and drank I heard Smith’s caveat that words always disguised as much as they delivered, covered up as much as they clarified, and by twilight I doubted every event and experience I’d squeezed into that ontological unit, the Procrustean bed of the English sentence. Come evening, I could stay at the Nest no longer. I climbed in the Chevelle and rode aimlessly for half an hour on the hills and backroads of Little Egypt, driving with my elbow out of the window, fingers curled on the roof. I stopped at a filling station, bought a newspaper, and read of a disaster in Memphis during a demonstration for striking sanitation workers. Sixty people injured. A sixteen-year-old black boy shot in the back. One hundred fifty-five stores damaged. I tossed the paper on the backseat, climbed behind the wheel, and drove for another hour until I realized my directionless wandering had brought me to Rev. Littlewood’s church.
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