Dreamer (12 page)

Smith had finished stretching. He scooted back from the spot where he'd been sitting and rested his back against a tree.

“What I'm saying is that my practice was correct. So good the Roshi promoted me to kitchen chef or
tenzo
. That's an honor, right? It means I'd been diligent. He put me in charge of preparing food to sustain the
Sangha,
and I was 'bout the only one the Old Man, the Roshi, didn't whack with his bamboo stick when time came for him to interview me 'bout my
koan
.

“It was great,” Smith said. Then, sourly, “For a year.”

“What happened? Why'd you leave?”

“Didn't want to.” He laughed. “I felt like I was in Shangri-la. I coulda stayed there forever. But one year to the very day I started, one of the priests said the Roshi wanted to see me. I was in the kitchen, making a sauce to go with wheat-paste noodles. Lemme tell you, it was
good
. Li'l sea tangle, sesame seeds, ginger, chopped green onions, and grated radishes. I washed my hands, then hurried to the Roshi's room. I struck the
umpan,
the gong, to let him know I'd arrived, then entered when he called. I knelt before him, never lifting my eyes, but I wondered fiercely why he wanted to see me. Had I done wrong? No, he told me. My practice was perfect. The other monks respected me. But (he said) I was a
gaijin
. A foreigner. Only a Japanese could experience true enlightenment. That's what he said. He didn't want me to waste my time. He was being compassionate—see?—or thought he was. I left that night, Bishop. If anything, my year in the temple taught me what Gautama figured out when he broke away from the holy men: if you want liberation, to be free, you got to get there on your own. All the texts and teachers are just tools. If you want to be free, you're
supposed
to outgrow them.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Don't feel sorry. There's no place anywhere for me. I seen that a long time ago. Wherever I go, I'm a nigger. Oh, and I been to mother Africa. Over there, where people
looked like me, I didn't fit either. I don't belong to a tribe. To them I was an American, a black one, and that meant I didn't belong anywhere.” He patted his pants and shirt, searching for his cigarettes. Having found the pack in his breast pocket, Smith lit one with a Zippo lighter, and blew a smoke ring my way. Then quietly he asked, “What about you? Do you feel at home—
really
at home—anywhere?”

“No.” I thought of my blundering pass earlier in the farmhouse. “I don't. Ever …”

“Then you're damned too,” Smith said. “You got the mark. That's what I seen on you. Outcasts know each other. The blessed know us too, and keep their distance, and I can't say I blame 'em. We scare 'em. We make 'em uncomfortable. We're the unwanted, the ones always passed over. Until the day we die, we're drifters. Won't no place feel right for long. And that's okay. I accept that. Hell, I embrace it. My spirit don't ever have to be still. It don't need to sleep. Fuck that. The only thing is, I don't want to be forgotten. Not by the goddamn sheep. Or God. I want to
do
something to make Him remember this nigger—
me
—for eternity.

Then Smith was quiet for a while, staring past me toward the lights of the farmhouse, and something in me quieted as well. He was a man without a home. Without a race. I pitied him and myself, for what he'd said about knowing no place on earth where he could find peace and security was something I'd often felt and feared, and perhaps that was even why I wanted—or believed I wanted—Amy. Now I feared it less, and for the first time since Chaym Smith surfaced during the Chicago riots, I understood the labyrinthal depths of his (our) suffering. Or did I? Hadn't he said all stories were lies? What, then, was I to make of the one he'd just told me? It had seduced me, but as always I didn't exactly know where truth ended and make-believe began with him.

“What will you do?” I asked. “Doc told us to help you—”

“Help me, then.” He got to his feet, brushing grass off the seat of his britches. “Best thing you and the girl can do is teach me what I don't know about Dr. King.” His smile gleamed in the moonlight, followed by that maddening, ticlike wink. “Do that, and I'll take care of everything else.”

At the SCLC part of my job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity—particularly what took place in the interstices. Naturally, this is where the stories of all doubles occur. In a spiral notebook, one I kept from my college days, I made entries on Chaym Smith's progress, having no idea at the time that just possibly I was composing a gospel. I—even I—was startled to discover how much he'd already absorbed about King since 1954, as a man might meticulously study his rival, or an object of love, or—in his case—someone he loved and envied simultaneously. He was determined to
possess
the mystery of the minister's power and popularity, to make it his own. In the days following our arrival at the Nest, one flowing into the next in a round-the-clock ribbon of dress rehearsals for the role Smith was set on playing, we three were subtly transformed, Amy
no less than I as we looked to impress the matrix of the minister Unto our charge.

Of course, he began with the Bible, rereading his heavily underlined New Testament in a marathon review that began Friday late and lasted well into the following Monday His capacity for sustained, one-pointed concentration was uncanny, a skill—that of
dharana
—he'd acquired during his year at the temple in Kyoto. He highlighted in red every statement by Jesus, who most certainly was known as “Joshua” in his own time and possibly was a member of the Essenes, a Jewish monastic order influenced by Hinduism. Around the farmhouse Smith had Amy pin photographs of everyone important in King's life and sheets of paper containing the scriptural citations most often encountered in his sermons. These he committed to memory, sometimes through rote repetition, sometimes through mnemonic devices that allowed him to absorb whole speeches, provided he could call up the pictorial “pegs” on which key phrases and ideas had been placed. Soon enough it became clear that as Smith immersed himself in the first thirty-seven years of King's journey, he was entering a portal that, far from stopping at the borders of the black world or the Baptist faith, exploded outward into what King himself once called, in a phrase far more revealing of himself than he knew, the “inescapable network of mutuality.”

He sent me to the state college over in Carbondale, where I photocopied the available sermons by preachers who'd influenced King's oratorical style. This took a full day, and led to the startling (for me) and exhilarating (for Smith) discovery that many of the minister's most famous speeches were tissues of pirated material from nearly three dozen theologians and popular (white) American preachers from the '4os and '5os, their ideas and idioms, voices and vocabularies, so blended with his own blistering denunciations of
bigotry that, once I brought these documents back to the Nest, we found it impossible to demarcate where the minds (and the archaeology of that most ancient of objects, the self) of Harry Emerson Fosdick, C. L. Franklin, and Robert McCracken ended and King's properly commenced. In his sermons he was, in essence, not one man but an integrated Crowd, containing here a smidgen of Walter Rauschenbusch, there a bit of Gerald Kennedy, and everywhere the imposing influence of his father. In effect, the minister riffed (not unlike Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington) on the entire, two-millennia-old history of Christendom, blending its best and making that his own in a stunningly Yankee amalgam.

Smith found this discovery of some of King's sources, his borrowings, gratifying. Gleefully so. “You know, I always figured he couldn't be as smart as he seems,” Smith said, yet I doubted he believed that. He was looking for faults, anything to reduce the minister's stature and give himself room to breathe. But I wondered, as we examined King's intellectual genesis and his Elizabethan borrowings, if the self we constructed was anything more than a fragile composite of other selves we'd encountered—a kind of epistemological salad—indebted to all spoken languages, all evolutionary forms, all lives that preceded our own, so that, when we spoke, it could be said, in the final analysis, subjectivity vanished and the world sang in every sentence we uttered. (And thus narrative was not a lie.) Added to that, and perhaps strangest of all, I noticed that as Smith pored over King's speeches he at first resisted statements that contradicted his own experience of things—for example, the minister saying, “It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting heredity and environmental circumstances.” In learning, there was an inescapable moment of alienation and displacement, a plunge into uncertainty and
insecurity in the new, the
other
; but then, miraculously, as he relaxed from resisting the revolution possible with each new perception, that interval of disorientation passed, and he found that no matter how far his mind had traveled, or how alien the data of knowledge might have seemed at first, he had in the end through these studies encountered only a dimension of himself.

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.