Dreamer (18 page)

Quite possibly, that was the longest day of my life. The old man was a bad shot. Only one round had struck Smith, the bullet slamming into his left side with the force of a sledgehammer, then punching out his back. He'd lost a great deal of blood and lay so still on the stained bedsheets I was afraid he was slipping away. No, that wasn't right. As I sat beside him, checking his bandages, I couldn't shake the feeling
that it was not Chaym but King dying right before me, and all because I'd frozen, paralyzed by my own fear, when I saw the old man draw his pistol and pump round after round into the car. If he died, it was my doing.

Once or twice I thought he'd stopped breathing. Then, just as I was about to run from the room to wake Amy, wind lifted his chest again and clouded the mirror I held close to his mouth. Still, he did not answer when I whispered his name; he remained as remote and unreachable as my mother had been when she was dying in a hospital bed at Cook County and I stayed beside her cooling body night and day, holding her left hand, listening to her breaths come at ever slower intervals. I'd prayed. Bent over her, gripping her hand, I begged the god she'd given me when I was a child to return to me whole the only person in this world who'd cared if I lived or died, but He did not accept the offering of my tears, and she was taken from me, I was orphaned, and whatever flame of faith she'd nurtured in me flimmered out forever. Though I owed Smith my life, I could rekindle none of that. My prayers rang empty in my own ears. Hollow rinds. Form without feeling. And in this fallen condition I could neither pray for his recovery nor believe, if he died, that any part of his personality—his consciousness, his well-stocked mind—would survive the promised failure of the flesh.

Later that night, I walked unshaven, aching in every fiber, into the kitchen, tasting the film on my teeth, so tired I felt even Lena Home couldn't keep me awake. My eyes ached. I found Amy seated at the table, her lips compressed, toying with something she'd fished from the littered front room. I sat down across from her, picking up the object she pushed toward me. A broken flower vase. Turning it over, I felt my heart tighten. Taped inside was a tiny monitoring device no bigger than a thumbnail.

“I disabled it,” said Amy. “Matthew … we need to talk. I thought I was strong, but … I'm just not cut out to be in the trenches.”

“You
are
strong.”

“No way.” She leaned her head left, the way she did when thinking. “I've never seen anyone shot before. Oh, on TV, sure. Or at the movies. But the real thing? I don't want to see that again. I can't handle it. If you or he had died …” She waved away the thought. “I know we're being watched. Maybe right now. And I can't take that. After Chaym is on his feet, I'm going back to the city. You two can stay here. I'll talk to Mama Pearl about it.”

“Any chance I can change your mind?”

“None. I'm sorry.”

“Suppose Doc calls us? Can you stick it out until the first of the year?”

“Maybe … No promises. I want to get on with my life.”

My tongue, that traitor, flew ahead of my thoughts. “I'll miss you.”

“I think I'll miss you too.” All at once, her eyes crinkled and she laughed for the first time in days in that light, effervescent way I'd loved from the first day I met her at school. With her forefinger Amy pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, and looked at me as if for the first time. “I didn't know you very well when we started this. Mama Pearl used to always tell me not to judge a book by its cover. I guess that's really true for bookworms, eh? I mean, Matthew, you talk like a damned thesaurus. You don't think like anybody I know. At first I didn't know what to make of that. Now I know that's just you. And I know something else too. If I was ever in trouble, I'd want you around. Maybe if you get back to Chicago, you could give me a call.”

“Amy,” I said, “I understand how you feel. What happened last night, with that lunatic we picked up, and the way
this place was broken into since we left is …
Call you, did you say?
”

“Yes. Call me.”

“I … I will.”

Oh, but Matthew—”

“What?”

“Get rid of the pencil-holder in your shirt pocket, okay?”

Yet Smith's recovery was not all that concerned us. Upstate in Chicago, where the marches continued, King's highstakes chess game against that Belshazzar, Daley, grew more daring and dangerous, culminating in a promise to lead his legions into Chicago's no-man's-land for the Negro: Cicero. Richard Ogilvie, the Cook County sheriff, rightly called this “suicide”; he begged the minister to reconsider, but the possibility for bringing to the surface the real face of urban racism for all to see was too great for King to pass up. Not now. Not after Daley'd maneuvered through the courts and Judge Cornelius Harrington to limit the frequency, size, and duration of the demonstrations. And besides, this was the sort of fight his militant detractors were spoiling for—going head-up against the American Nazi Party's George Lincoln Rockwell and every other fascist faction that flew to Chicago to join forces with enraged whites in ethnic enclaves. As the day, August 28, for the assault on Cicero approached, swords were gleefully drawn on both sides.

Then, just two days before C-Day, the mayor blinked, calling for a meeting in the Monroe Room of the Palmer House, where with King he presided over a conference that in effect conceded that his city had not done enough. The meeting lasted ten hours. It included members of the Chicago Real Estate Board, the Housing Authority, and the SCLC, other black activists, Archbishop John Cody, and business leaders. Promises were made to promote fair housing practices and
enforce them, encourage legislation, and make colorblind bank loans to qualified families. The Summit Agreement, though not wholly satisfactory to King (it had no guarantees, no schedule, nothing but good intentions), was nonetheless broader in boons won for the black poor than anything he'd achieved in the South, and so he delayed the march into Cicero. Later, at a church on the West Side, he admitted, “Morally, we ought to have what we say in the slogan, Freedom Now. But it doesn't all come now. That's a sad fact of life you will have to live with.”

Some, like members of SNCC and Robert Lucas of CORE, refused to live with that. They couldn't wait, they said. To their eyes, the Summit Agreement was a sellout, an emergency exit King used to parachute out of his promise to end slum dwelling in Chicago. Many proclaimed they were tired of being led by middle-class Negroes and rejected the Agreement terms. A new black cat was on the scene, they said, represented by the fierce black masculinity of Stokely, who told it like it was—and by ex-cons in the Black Panther Party. Without King's endorsement, CORE plunged two hundred strong into Cicero in early September, protected by a couple of thousand National Guardsmen. The violence rivaled that of the Marquette march, forcing the marchers to fall back to Lawndale.

After issuing a warning that if the Agreement was not implemented he would renew his agitation, the minister ended his campaign in Chicago and returned to Atlanta, leaving the struggle in Chicago to local groups and Operation Breadbasket, but there was fallout from this northern battle that would follow him forever. After he returned to Atlanta, I phoned him in late October, calling from the same filling station booth I'd used before, and briefly put Smith on the line with him. Although there was depression and lassitude in his tone, the minister thanked Smith and said he
would pray for him to soon be back on his feet. The monthly payments would keep coming; when he needed a stand-in, he would be in touch.

But King did not call again, and this was good, because Smith's healing was not quite as we'd expected, or hoped for. In fact, it more resembled a being's slow emergence from a chrysalis than convalescence. And it took months, demanding that Amy stay longer than she'd planned, for the nearness of death had altered him. Indeed, he might
have
died on us a time or two and, like Lazarus, returned to life in a country where the customs and language were only faintly remembered.

He was wan, hollow-eyed, and kept saying, “Gu-od damn, I'm
still
here?” During his convalescence he never quite seemed to get over his astonishment that he was alive. Like so many who've recovered from sickness or injury, he took longer to accomplish ordinary things, having to adjust whatever he did to accommodate his heavily bandaged left side, to relearn how best to stand, lower himself into a chair, and bend forward if he dropped something. Once, I came into his bedroom, carrying a tray with toast, marmalade, and coffee, and I found him propped up on his pillows, lifting his hands to hold shafts of morning sunlight spilling across the air onto his blankets, trying to close his fingers round the bright columns as a child might, then laughing out loud when he failed. He did not want to talk about the attempted assassination he'd foiled, or to claim bragging rights from it. Which baffled me. Wasn't this what he'd wanted? His bid for a place in the history books? In point of fact, Smith spoke very little to Amy and me as he healed. Colors changed in southern Illinois, the days lost their heat, and wind shirred withered leaves and wuthered in the bare treetops. The night air smelled of rain. Around the Nest, he willingly helped us put Mama Pearl's house back in order, and carried water
from the well as if doing so simple a task was itself miraculous. He withdrew to his bedroom at night and spent his evenings on a closer study of the minister's sermons, the Pentateuch, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Emerson, the medieval schoolmen, Lotus Sutra, Albertus Magnus, the Vedas (Rig, Sama, Yajur, Atharva), and diverse mystical traditions that piqued his curiosity (Some evenings I whiffed from behind Smith's closed door the sweet scent of marijuana, and heard the deep-throated, lonely sound, the soul, of his saxophone as it transmuted his anguish and exile into something more vatic than his own weaker voice could convey.) He took notes for himself on the margins of newspapers, hardly noticing the news stories (the defection of Stalin's daughter, riots in more than one hundred American cities), wasting not a single scrap of paper, and in virtually everything to which he turned his hand during his recovery I felt a deepening quiet in him, a turning of his attention away from the social crises and catastrophes we heard broadcast on the kitchen radio (antiwar demonstrations at the Pentagon, Stokely Carmichael's visit to Cuba) to little things—everyday things that had no scribe—with complete absorption and care. To a degree, he seemed more indifferent to himself after the shooting, emptied of envy, as if he lacked the energy to invest in it. For example, Smith simply forgot to shave, letting his mustache evolve into a scraggly goatee that grew into a grayflecked beard, and his uncombed hair to emerge by inches into an Afro, which diminished by more than a little his striking likeness to King.

Thus, Smith drew not a single stare or whispered comment the Sunday morning we drove Amy to the old Illinois Central train station in the center of Carbondale. On racks near the ticket window there were day-old
Southern Illinoisan
newspapers headlining Muhammad Ali's problems with the draft and the shooting of H. Rap Brown in Cambridge,
Maryland, and next to them were displays for candy, Doublemint chewing gum, and sunglasses. Smith purchased a pair (and also some gum), and once he wrapped the glasses round his ears all comparisons to King vanished. One traveler, a young black student from the college, kept staring our way, then tentatively approached where we sat on hard wooden benches waiting for Amy's train, and asked, “Excuse me, sir, are you LeRoi Jones?”

And then the whistle of the Chicago-bound train blew, Amy climbed on board, and within minutes she was waving to us from her window seat as her coach pulled away, taking my heart with it. I stood on the raised cement platform, my trouser legs rippling in wind from the Illinois Central. I waited, wanting her to know I would not leave until the last speck of her coach disappeared in the distance. I took the pencil-holder from my shirt pocket and tossed it away, onto the tracks, and followed a brooding Smith back to the small, crowded parking lot. In silence, we retraced our route through Giant City, came to the road leading to the farmhouse, and Smith, poking a stick of gum between his lips, noticed a few automobiles parked near the Methodist church we'd passed, oh, what must have been a dozen times.

“Pull in there, Bishop. I need to see something.”

The church, Bethel AME, sat about fifteen yards back from the road. The rear was under construction—perpetually, I thought, because its congregation, very poor, ran out of money before the framing of much needed additional rooms was finished. For two years, Amy'd told me, Bethel's remodeling had been on hold. Out back, where generations of Griffiths were buried, waist-high weeds obscured the headstones. Its parishioners were plain, country people, primarily elderly women who worked as domestics in white homes in the area, a few retired men living on their pensions, and small children dragged to services by their grandparents.
It was not an activist church. Its ranks of teenagers and those in their twenties thinned after the rise of the Black Power movement. They never returned, despite the church's hiring of a young minister from East St. Louis, Rev. Allan Littlewood, to attract them.

From the gravel parking lot, we heard a spirited singing of “Peace Like a River.” Smith eased out of the car, holding his left side and listening, his head tilted to the right, humming along, yet he seemed hesitant to move any closer. Next came “Rock of Ages,' and as this song shook the walls of Bethel, I took Smith's arm and opened the door, and we slipped inside, treading softly on our soles like thieves, then sat in the last row of seats, hoping not to be seen. There were no more than fifty people in the room. Older women in simple, bright summer dresses held their hymnbooks, fanning with folded copies of the church's newsletter, “The Trumpet.” Smith kept on chewing, his eyes tracking left, right, both hands squeezing his knees. He did not look comfortable. But there was something—I couldn't say what—that had drawn him here.