Dreamer (21 page)

Yahya grinned. “For King, huh? I guess we got some Uncle Tom nigguhs here. When the Revolution comes, y'all got to
go
.”

Now Amy was trembling. “You'd kill other black people?”

“Sistuh, I hate to say this, but you'n and that brother sound like house niggers to me. I don't think you understand anything about the necessity of revolutionary violence. I'd appreciate it if you'd let me finish talking to the
real
black people in this room.”

Amy squeezed my hand so tightly I feared she might break the bones in my fingers. Witheringly, she gave me a sad, sideways look, as if to say,
I'm sorry, I didn't know
. I leaned back on my chair, wanting to leave but knowing we were Yahya Zubena's captives until he finished. Against my will, I listened while he instructed the others on what to do when the white man came to get them, as Nazis had rounded up Jews in Poland thirty years before. Come they would, said Yahya. It was only a matter of time because blacks were asking for too much too quickly. “I'm telling y'all, the white man would rather blow it all up rather than give it up!” The evidence for this, he explained, was in the history books, where any fool could see that Caucasians were driven to conquest and oppression because they were “ice people” who came from cold European climates and subjugated ancient, peace-loving “sun people” everywhere in Africa. (Was I imagining this, or hadn't the minister once said, “The Negro knows nothing of Africa, he is an American”?) He droned on and on, his descriptions of whites as Cainites and coloreds as Abelites fascinating to me, given the book I'd read on the train, and I thought of Chaym as he outlined his airtight, one-dimensional
interpretation of history, one in which there was no room for ambiguity, or for counterexamples to his arguments, or for people like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or even Jackie Robinson. His historical vision was
kitsch
. Revolutionary
kitsch
. The way he reasoned, with racial politics as every syllogism's major premise, led all his thoughts to the same terminus. (Of course, if the only tool you have is a hammer, it's likely you'll treat every problem—and person—as a nail.) I doubted his comparison of black communities to concentration camps, and his claim that Negroes could never be racist because, as Yahya said, “You can't be racist unless you have power. Black folks don't have power, so we can't be racist.” It was the logic of Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” and there in the Black People's Liberation Library, I felt as if I'd fallen down a rabbit hole into a Wonderland where all the world's meanings were reversed. Yahya reminded me of the militant black students I met at Columbia College, dashiki-wearing radicals who, after I'd contradicted one of them at a meeting of the Black Student Union, told me I wasn't black enough to belong to their group. They cast me out of their meetings. In response, I formed, then briefly led, the first Bible study group on campus for a year before my faith in the god of the Book began to fade. They (and Yahya) made me recall King, who warned, “There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored and anything noncolored is condemned.” And even more importantly, “We shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect.”

By the time Yahya finished, Amy looked ill. Noticing this, Yahya cut his eyes our way. “I don't suppose you two agree with me, do you?”

Her words were hardly above a hiss. “I've seen good white people who sacrificed their lives on Freedom Rides.

Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed and buried under a Mississippi dam right beside James Chaney.”

“Uh-hunh, I heard about that. It's sad, sistuh, but the way I see it, your average white boy won't go that far. Some of 'em might fight for colored folks when they're young and rebelling against their elders, but sooner or later they get that wake-up call from their own people, who pull their coat to the fact that it's their privileged future they're foolin' with, and if they keep acting up, they won't be on top no more. What
that
means is they gonna cut their hair, clean themselves up, and put on a three-piece suit with a pair of red suspenders, and shake off the woolly-headed woogies they been hanging out with. Naw, honey, white boys
always
make sure they got it better than us.”

“And you believe that?” she asked. “Are you saying Dr. King's life is poorer—as a life—than Richard Speck's?”

“Speck's white, ain't he?”

With that, Amy stood up. “Can we
leave
now, please?”

“Maybe you'd better,” said Yahya.

Back in the car, she was too exasperated to speak as we pulled away. Finally she brought out, “I'm
sorry,
Matthew! I would never have taken you there if I'd known what it was about.”

“You don't have to apologize—”

“Yes, I
do!
I suppose when he takes over, he'll drive people like you and me into the gas chambers. Mama Pearl always told me that
anybody
who tried to get me to hate was my enemy.” Leaning back on the seat, she took a long breath. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “I've
dated
guys who talked like him. Can you believe that? They're the reason I wasn't seeing
anybody
when we met. I mean, I'd given up. All that hate for the white man turned so quickly—if I disagreed with them—into some of them slapping me hard enough to shake loose my teeth. Or they'd use that excuse about the Man
holding them down as the reason why they couldn't keep a job and expected
me
to support them—and their drug habits! I was just sick of it, that's all.” Amy paused, looking me up and down as I pulled to a stop at an intersection. “There's no hate in you, Matthew. I like that. I trust that. And I'm glad you got rid of that silly pencil-holder.”

“Do … do you want to get something to eat?”

“No, I'm not hungry. Just take me home, okay?”

She'd found a new apartment, this one located on the corner of Dearborn and Huron. After I parked, Amy asked, “Would you like to come up for a drink or something?” I said yes. (I was less interested in the drink than in the “something.”) I followed her up one flight to a door it took her forever to unlock (there were four padlocks and latches on it). Once inside, I saw that sixty dollars a month bought her an efficiency apartment divided into a living room, a kitchen, and a minuscule bath. Her front room was furnished ceiling to floor with bookshelves (I noticed titles I'd given her by Jean Toomer and Claude McKay when we were in college, ones in which I'd playfully signed the authors' names and written glowing praise for her), and tables and chairs made from driftwood. The floors were bare. A fisherman's net swung from the ceiling. On the wall over her sofabed were black-and-white movie (
Stormy Weather
) and theater (
A Raisin in the Sun
) posters. Amy tossed her purse onto a chair, flipped through her album collection quickly, and put John Coltrane's
A Love Supreme
on her stereo. On the kitchen counter she lit a stick of pine incense; then she popped open the refrigerator and filled two wineglasses with pinot noir.

Twilight was coming on, thickening throughout her rooms, spreading inside the apartment like a tone, a touch of the keys on the far left side of a piano, like a stain of teal-blue watercolor that caught along the surface of the wineglass
she handed me and reflected off her windows. A whiff of twilight even tinctured shadows in the corners: a base color lying beneath all others as streetlights below us on Dearborn winked on and night's density gathered in her curtains and—yes—in my mind, because I couldn't believe I was standing there, sipping wine that flew right to my head, and Amy was kicking off her shoes and looking at me in the way I'd imagined only in my dreams.

“After tonight I feel … soiled. I think I need to take a shower.”

“Oh …” I stammered. “Go ahead, I'll wait out here.”

“I was hoping, Matthew, you'd take it
with
me.”

Straightaway, she disrobed, leaving her blue dress and white undergarments on the floor, and walked—I want to say
floated
—toward her bathroom. Believing I was dead or dreaming, I pinched my arm. Ouch. Then I heard water spurting a room away. I shed my own clothes as quickly as I could, hurried barefoot to the bathroom, and found Amy soaping her shoulders in billowing clouds of steam. I squeezed into the small cubicle with her. Instantly my glasses began to fog. Very gently she lifted them off my face, pressed her lips against mine, then handed me the bar of Lifebuoy. With it I lathered my hands, and as she closed her eyes, lifting her head a little, my fingers traced her forehead and cheeks, then moved down, soaping every crevice and swale, and it was as if I was sculpting her the way Pygmalion did his masterpiece, slowly discovering every muscle and fold, as I massaged from Amy's chin to her calves, and then she did the same for me, lathering places where I didn't know I even had places, and then we toweled each other dry, both of us a little drunk by then from touching and pinot noir, and dropped onto her bed, and I said,
Tell me what you want me to do,
which she did, and for the next two hours—or perhaps it was three—I did everything Amy wanted, in just
the way she wanted it, for I
do
pride myself on my work, whatever it is.

“Well,” she said when we were done, “I guess it's true.”

I was groggy, squinting at her electric alarm clock: 11:30. “What's true?”

“Still waters run deep.”

I was trying to figure out what she meant by that when the telephone on a table beside her bed rang. Amy picked it up, pressed it against her ear, and said, “'Lo?” As she listened, her face changed. She said, “Chaym, is that
you?
” Moments later the phone was dead. Amy placed it back on its base, her expression that of bewilderment.

“Matthew … something's wrong.”

“That was Chaym? How did he get your number?”

“The same way you did. The phone book. He must have called me from that filling station in town—”

“What did he
say?
”

She swung her feet over the side of the bed, pulled on an old housecoat, and sat away from me on a chair, squeezing her hands, her knees pressed together. “I don't
know
what he was talking about! Something about … a green Plymouth, people watching him. Did you see a car like that?”

I had, but I said nothing.

“I'm worried. I think you should see if he's okay.”

“
Now?
”

“Yes, now!” she said. “We made Dr. King a promise.”

“That's a six-hour drive! We were just beginning to—”

“I'll
be
here when you get back. Do you love me?”

“How can you even ask?”

She stepped back to the bed. I lifted my left arm, and she slid in close, her head on my shoulder and her hand on my chest. “Then you'll do it for me, right?” Leaving her was the last thing I wanted to do, and at that moment I hated Smith. But being me, I remembered words I'd taped long ago on my
refrigerator door:
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love, would faint and lie down
. Thomas à Kempis. Of course, he was never asked to leave the bed of a woman who looked better than a batch of Miss Gurdey Maye's buttermilk biscuits.

The sacrifices I made for the Movement …

“Matthew?”

“Okay, I'm
going
.”

By late afternoon, I was back in Makanda, cursing Smith as I climbed the steps to the farmhouse. He was nowhere to be seen, so I drove to Rev. Littlewood's church, wondering if something evil had befallen him, which is what I'd deliciously imagined during the long drive, but now I was worried and feeling guilty that I'd left him when so many people wanted King dead and might mistake Smith for the minister. It was a Friday. The church was vacant. I used one of the keys Rev. Littlewood had given us when we started work on Bethel to let myself in. I looked to no avail for Smith but noticed something else. Portions of the church dated from different periods, like a palimpsest, reaching back to the end of the Civil War when black couples separated by slavery held mass weddings on this very site, as many as a hundred men and women gathering to exchange wedding vows and have their long-deferred unions sanctified and cemented by the Christian faith.

The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, the African, the Roman,
the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experience of the spirit. On either side of the entrance were two cracked stained-glass windows of intersecting tracery, the mullions of each branching out into curved bars, below them smooth masonry with chamfered edges. Under the direction of the church's first pastor, the congregation finished the church's foyer and stairs leading up to the sanctuary, but it fell to the next generation to complete the choir stand and the storeroom where wooden crates containing the church's archives—tithings, mimeograph copies of a weekly newsletter, and records on christenings, funerals, and donations—were stacked almost to the ceiling; then it fell to a third generation to raise additional rooms in the rear for special meetings. In the original braces strengthening the frame of the roof, in the quoins at the church's four corners, in the small choir section to the left of the pulpit, added during the 1920s by parishioners whose names were now lost, I saw a creation that on every level—from purlins to wallplates—transcended the passing of its founders, one that no single generation could live to see completed and thus was handed down and on to those yet unborn for its continual restoration and completion.