Dreamer (2 page)

More tired, acclaimed, hated, gaoled, and hunted than any other Negro in history, but living this close to death was as inevitable as his being ordained a minister when he was eighteen. No matter how he looked at it, his calling meant that from the moment he donned his robe the laws governing his life were different from those of the vast majority of men; indeed, it was no longer his life to do with as he pleased. The
world owned him long before he could own himself. As it is with candles, so it was with him: the more light he gave, the less there was of him. Moreover, since the First World War the Army had sniffed something dangerous in his family, some blood-gift for subversion more radical than anything Lenin dreamed up in Moscow; they had watched his father and grandfather closely, and interfered with their lives just as they did his, as devoted to shaming him, discrediting him, and driving him from public life as he was to bringing his ever expanding congregation a bit closer to the Kingdom of God on earth. People always thought he was older than his thirty-seven years. In point of fact, he felt old. Centuries old, and looked over fifty in some photographs: washed by all waters. Sometimes late at night, when he couldn't sleep before yet another early morning flight, and his leather suitcase from Paris lay packed on the table in yet another unfamiliar hotel room, and the memories came washing over him in waves—the poor living like chattel, children dynamited in a church, Watts burning for six days, the death threats spewing through the telephone at his wife—on those nights he wept for the blood spilled by his enemies, for his own life's lost options, for the outrageous fragility of what he hoped to achieve in a world smothering in materialism, in the propaganda of sensation, in scientific marvels unmoored from any sense of morality, and he wondered, there in the darkness before the dawn of what might be his last day on earth, if he'd ever been young at all.

“Don't go to Chicago,” his closest advisor said. “You can't win there. You don't know cities. Stay on your own turf.”

The enemy was more elusive, said Hosea Williams and the city's famed pastor, Joseph H. Jackson. Not crude country sheriffs like “Bull” Connor, who fell tail over tin cup before the world's cameras into the bully-buffoon role they scripted for him, or heavy-browed bigots like George Wallace, whose reactions made outstanding copy for the cause. In Chicago, the villains
were faceless institutions: banks, real estate agents, insurance companies, and landlords hardly better off, in some cases, than their ghetto tenants. But this town, he knew, was the Up North equivalent of Birmingham. If they could triumph here, establishing a beachhead for satyagraha (truth force) in a brutal city with a murder rate of slightly more than two people per day, here in balkanized ethnic enclaves that spawned Al Capone and hardened street gangs like the Cobras, the Vice Lords, and the Black Stone Rangers, here in a city where Stokely Carmichael's poorly timed hut inevitable cry for Black Power during their Mississippi march to support one of the South's wounded heroes, James Meredith, opened a Pandora's box of rage and rang deeper into black hearts than any appeal for love (he knew betrayal, a stab in the hack when he saw it, hut told Carmichael, “I've been used before”), then they could conquer any citadel of inequality in the world.

Yet no one thought he could win.

A decade after his Montgomery victory, and spiraling successes throughout the South, nigh Hegelian in the mysterious way the Movement kept changing as he chased it, and changing him, pushing him higher and higher, beyond anything he'd dreamed possible in college, from local bus boycotts to unqualified calls for integration, and finally to grander dreams of global peace and equality—a decade after his finest triumphs for nonviolence, the press, and even people who'd joined hands with him singing “We Shall Overcome,” now saw his methods as outmoded, his insistence on loving one's enemies as lunacy, his opposition to Black Power as outright betrayal. Oh, he needed a victory here. The Chicago crusade was costing as much as $10,000 some months. In the spirit of Martin Luther four centuries earlier, he taped his demands for the poor on the door of City Hall after marching three miles with five thousand men and women of goodwill from Soldier Field; but despite money spent and speeches delivered, the mayor's office maneuvered,
matching his call for jobs and open housing with promises and claims for progress that his critics dismissed as smoke and mirrors, mere Band-Aids aimed at making the problem (and him) go away. Never a day passed when he did not read that his stature was diminished, his day of leadership done, and he could not ignore his critics if he was, as he so often claimed, committed to the truth. Twelve times he'd been imprisoned in Alabama and Georgia jails, stabbed once, spat upon, and targeted for death so many times he could say, like the Apostle Paul, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord.” Yet for all his sojourning on the Jericho Road, his long journey through the valley of the shadow of death, his deeper, esoteric message about freedom had barely been heard. The gleaming keys he offered to the Kingdom made men and women who accepted his exoteric, surface-skimming political speeches shrink back once they saw the long-sealed door he was asking them to enter, they could not pass through that portal and remain as they were: white and black, male and female, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor—these were ephemeral garments, he knew, and could no more clear that entrance than a camel through a needle's eye. To gain the dizzying heights of the mountaintop the self's baggage had to be abandoned in the valley. Little wonder, then, that so few grasped the goal he pointed to, or that on the Mississippi march and then in Chicago he was booed, and would have wept over this but instead thought back with thanksgiving (and was not all thought, as Heidegger pointed out, a form of thanksgiving?) to his professor at Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, who impressed upon him the importance of learning Henley's poem “Invictus” (It matters not how strait the gate …). After his twelve years of sacrifice, the young people in the Mississippi crowd called him a traitor, an Uncle Tom
(How charged with punishments the scroll …).
In the cities, they sang “We Shall Over-Run.”
(I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.)

But somehow their rejection and resistance to his vision fit well into the way he then understood the world. He was a tightrope walker straddling two worlds. One of matter. One of spirit. Every social evil he could think of, and every “ontological fear,” as he was fond of saying lately, arose from that mysterious dichotomy inscribed at the heart of things: self and other, I and Thou, inner and outer, perceiver and perceived. It was a schism that, if not healed, would consume the entire world. Martyrdom held no appeal for him, but for every sorcerer named Jesus there was a Judas; for every bodhisattva called Gandhi, a Poona Brahmin named Nathuram Godse. The way to the crown was, now and forever, the cross. And it made no sense to carry the cross unless one was prepared to be crucified.

He sensed how close he was to the end, this Christian boy from Atlanta, this product of three generations of black preachers, this theistic idealist, and sometimes he wished he was two people, or perhaps three. One to co-pastor each Sunday beside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Another to spend more time with his family, especially with his children; catch up on his reading (especially Tillich, Fromm, and Buber, who interested him more now than when he was in college); listen to opera, take his wife dancing, play basketball with the Southern Christian Leadership Council's staff, leave his blue suits in the closet, dress more casually, and perhaps one day pursue a simple, ascetic life similar to that of Thich Nhat Hanh, the poet, Zen master, and chairman of the Vietnamese peace delegation whom he was currently promoting as a candidate for the Nobel. As he'd told his Montgomery congregation the day he resigned as pastor in 1959, he longed to escape “the strain of being known … I've been faced with the responsibility of trying to do as one man what five or six people ought to be doing … What I have been doing is giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat and meditate like I should—to come back. If the situation is not changed, I will
be a physical and emotional wreck. I have to reorganize my personality and reorient my life. I have been too long in the crowd, too long in the forest …”

And a third person to direct the Chicago campaign from the foul-smelling flat the SCLC and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations leased at 1550 South Hamlin Street in the heart of “Slumdale.” From a security standpoint its location was a nightmare. The neighborhood was notorious for crime. Saturday-night shootings and streetwalkers. Establishing a perimeter was impossible. Any rooftop across the street would tempt a rifleman. Noises from downstairs, loud, braying conversations from other apartments, could not be kept out. When a sanitation truck rolled by, the floor shuddered and pictures fell off the wall. Even so, he insisted that not a blessed thing in this soulless place be changed. They had come to Chicago to dramatize the fact that for $90 per month slumlords gave poor blacks—who on the average earned $4,700 yearly—the opportunity to dwell, some families packed ten to a flat, in wretched dumps of such advanced rot and decay that each crumbling unpainted wall, each untiled floor, each brokendown radiator, each crisp roach egg in the cabinets, each dishrag curtain on the windows, and each rusted faucet reinforced the free-floating despair that if you lived here, where every particle of your physical surroundings induced shame and was one step up from trash, was a throwaway, was substandard, then the country must regard you as a throwaway too.

The hallway leading to his third-floor rooms was black-dark. The stairs trembled under his feet. He couldn't lock the front door, so winos were free to piss in the entryway. In other words, the place where he'd brought his family was a urinal. And he, even he, hated the climb up the rickety steps to the top of the stairs. High above his door a single tungsten bulb buzzed in a halo of swirling dust motes the last few seconds before its filament flimmered out. Inside, their four rooms—hollow
rinds filled with secondhand furniture—were arranged boxcar style (one for sitting, two for sleeping, and a miserable little kitchen) and were blisteringly hot and claustrophobic in the summer of 1966, even when his wife threw open the windows, for whatever breezes came through the rooms earned as well petroleum fumes and loud conversations and the roar of traffic from the streets below. Was this worth ninety dollars a month? Moreover, was proving his point by living here worth the toll he saw it taking on his family? The drain, the darkening of their spirits. “There's nothing green in sight,” Coretta said, and for a moment he'd felt panicky, afraid, wondering if his work for his people, which he knew would kill him (“This is what is going to happen to me,” he'd told her as they sat solemnly watching the news of John Kennedy's murder)—wondering if it would destroy his beautiful wife and four children as well.

In the last forty-eight hours, he'd survived a meeting with Richard Daley, from whom he'd won a few precious concessions (sprinklers attached to fire hydrants, swimming pool shipped to the West Side) that might defuse the potential for more rioting; then he'd gathered with gang members to sway them to the side of nonviolence, meetings so torn by conflict and shouting and hatred of the police that he had to make himself appear to be the person at fault in order to calm the others down. Having come through these crises, and with more to face, the man from whom the world expected everything, who sometimes went for days on four hours of sleep and rested fully only when he checked into a hospital, tried for a moment to nap, to step back from the severe discipline that black manhood called for in the twentieth century for just one precious moment in the sweltering heat of his Lawndale flat.

I knocked on his open bedroom door. “Doc?”

Rolling over, he crushed the lumpy pillow against his chest but kept his eyes closed, probably hoping whoever had come would go away, at least for a few moments more. Except for one other security person, we were alone in the apartment. His wife and children were staying at the home of Mahalia Jackson until the shooting died down. Later he would tell me he'd been dreaming of the sunset at Land's End, that breathtaking stretch of beach on Cape Comorin in the Hindu state of Kerala, which struck him as the closest thing to paradise when he and Coretta traveled to India: he dreamed an ancient village of brown-skinned people (Africa was in their ancestry) who knew their lord Vishnu by a thousand names, for He was imminent in the sky and sand, wood and stone, masquerading as Many. He'd come to India not as
celebrated civil rights leader but as a pilgrim. To learn. And though the promise of that pilgrimage was cut short when he plunged into the ongoing crisis back home, he had indeed learned much. Against the glorious sunset of Kerala, with the softest whisper of song carried on the wind from temples close by,
Ahimsa paramo dharma,
his wife took his hand and turned him to see the moon swell up from the sea, and in that evanescent instant, at the place where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal flowed together, he experienced an ineffable peace, and had never felt so free, and …

“Doc, I'm sorry to bother you,” I said into the darkness. Though the lamps were off, burning fires outside the window pintoed his bedroom wall. “There's someone here to see you. I think you'd better take a look at him.”

When he looked toward the door, toward me, I knew what he saw: a twenty-four-year-old with the large, penetrating “frog eyes” of his friend James Baldwin behind a pair of granny glasses, dehydrating and dripping sweat in brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt weighted down by a battery of pencils and pens. I stepped into the room and walked directly to the window, looking down before I shut it on streets turned into combat zones as treacherous as any that year in Tay Ninh or Phnom Penh. The fuse: black kids cranking on fire hydrants. The flame: police trying to stop them. The consequence: a crowd that poured bricks and whiskey bottles and then ricocheting bullets from balconies and rooftops. It was not a night, July 17, to be out in bedlam unless you had to be. Firefighters dousing blazes set by roving street gangs had to be out there. Marksmen hunkered down behind their squad cars, praying that Governor Kerner would order, as promised, four thousand National Guardsmen into the city, had to be there—and so in a few short hours did the man whose sleep I had interrupted.