Dreamer (3 page)

At the window, I could see two men shoot out the streetlight at the intersection of Sixteenth Street and South Hamlin. Their first shots missed the target; then at last one struck, plunging the corner into darkness. A sound of shattering glass came from the grocery store on Sixteenth Street. The pistol fire had been so close, just below the window, it changed air pressure inside the building, tightening my inner ear. Roving gangs were setting cars on fire. Light from the interiors of torched cars threw shadows like strokes of tar across the bedroom's furnishings. Below the window figures darted furtively through the darkness, their colors and clans indistinguishable, slaying—or trying to slay—one another. I no longer knew on which side of this slaying I belonged. Or if there was any victory, pleasure, or Promised Land that could justify the killing and destruction of the past three nights.

I looked at the watch on my wrist. The luminous numerals read 8:15, but it felt more like midnight in the soul.

“Who is it?” The minister rubbed his eyes. “Is he here for the Agenda Committee meeting? Tell him I'll be ready in just a minute—”

“No, sir. He's outside in the hallway now. Reverend, I think you
need
to take a look at this.”

After swinging his feet to the floor, he sat hunched forward, both elbows on his knees, waiting for his head to clear. I noticed he wore no cross around his neck. Nor did he need one. With his shirt open, there in the bedroom's heat, I could see the scar tissue shaped like a rood—a permanent one—over his heart, carved into his flesh by physician Aubre D. Maynard when he removed Izola Curry's letter opener from his chest in Harlem Hospital. I knew he was tired, and I did not rush him. His staff had been working off-the-clock since the West Side went ballistic. He hadn't slept in two days. Neither had I. All this night I'd drifted in and out of
nausea, finding a clear space where I briefly felt fine, then as I heard the gunfire again, sirens, the sickness returned in spasms of dizziness, leaving me weak and overheated, then chilled.

He reached toward his nightstand for the wristwatch he'd left on top of a stack of books—
The Writings of Saint Paul, Maritain's Christianity and Democracy,
Nietzsche's
The Anti-Christ
—alongside the sermon he was preparing for the coming Sunday. Typically, his sermons took two-thirds of a day to compose. In them his conclusions were never merely closures but always seemed to be fresh starting points. The best were classically formal, intentionally Pauline, cautious at the beginning like the first hesitant steps up a steep flight of stairs, then each carefully chosen refrain pushed it higher, faster, with mounting intensity, toward a crescendo that fused antique form and African rhythms, Old Testament imagery and America's most cherished democratic ideals—principles dating back to the Magna Carta—into a shimmering creation, a synthesis so beautiful in the way his words alchemized the air in churches and cathedrals it could convert the wolf of Gubbio. He was, I realized again, a philosopher, which was something easy to forget (even for him) in a breathless year that began with the January murder of student Sammy Younge in Alabama, seventeen-year-old Jerome Huey beaten to death in Cicero in May, Fred Hubbard shot in April, Ben Chester White (Mississippi) and Clarence Triggs (Louisiana) killed by the Klan in June and July, the Georgia legislature's refusal to seat Julian Bond in February because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, Kwame Nkrumah deposed as Ghana's leader the same month, then the slaughter of eight Chicago student nurses by a madman named Richard Speck. Not until I saw the books by his bed did I recall that in a less tumultuous time he taught Greek thought to a class of Morehouse students, among them
Julian Bond, who testified that King, a freshly minted Ph.D., often looked up from his notes, closed his copy of Plato's collected dialogues, and brought whole cloth out of his head passages from Socrates' apology, emphasizing the seventy-one-year-old sage's reply to his executioners, “I would never submit wrongly to any authority through fear of death, but would refuse even at the cost of my life.”

After turning his watch-stem a few times, he squinted up at me, searching his mind for my name. I could tell he remembered me only as one of his organization's many, nameless volunteers.

“I know I've seen you, urn—”

“Matthew, sir. Matthew Bishop.”

“Oh yes, of course,” he said.

Although he took great care to put everyone on his staff at ease, I'd always felt awkward and off-balance on the few occasions I'd been in his presence; I'd never seemed able to say the right things or find a way to stand or sit that didn't betray how disbelieving I was that he was talking to someone who had as little consequence in this world (or the next) as I did. As he pulled on his shoes, I guessed straightaway what he was thinking: I was not making sense, nor was I much to look at. I knew I left no lasting impression on people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name. I had no outstanding features, no “best side,” as they say, to hold in profile. During SCLC meetings, a demonstration, rally, or march, I blended easily into the background, as bland and undistinguished as a piece of furniture, so anonymous most people forgot I was there. I was no taller than the minister himself, but much thinner: a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself. I kept my hair neatly trimmed, wore respectable shoes, and always had a book or magazine nearby to flip open when I found myself alone,
which, as it turned out, was most of the time, even when I was in a crowd. I was nobody. A man reminded of his mediocrity—and perishability—nearly every moment of the day. A nothing. Merely a face in the undifferentiated mass of Movement people who dutifully did what our leaders asked, feeling sometimes like a cog in a vast machine—I did feel that way often: replaceable like the placards we made for a march, or the flyers we plastered all over the city, only to paper over them with new pages a week later.

Then why did I join? My mother revered Dr. King. And I did too. Compared with the minister and his family, who were Georgia brahmins, the closest thing black America had to a First Family, we were at best among the “little people,” like the inconspicuous disciple Andrew, destined to run their errands and man their ditto machines on the margins of history. Nevertheless, my mother (to me) was regal, aristocratic by virtue of her actions: a sister to Mother Pollard who, when stopped by reporters during the Montgomery boycott, said, “My feets is tired but my soul is rested.” It was that woman and my mother King had in mind when in his 1955 speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church he said, “When the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning into the veins of civilization.'” That was true of him, of course. History knew nothing of Ellesteen Bishop. Since her death it was as if she'd never lived, and now only existed in memory, in me during those times when I thought of her, which were less and less each year, and when I ceased to be, it seemed to me, all vestiges of her would vanish as well. (Often I tried to reconstruct her face, and found I could not remember, say, her ears. How could I forget my own mother's ears?) In her mind, the minister was a saint. She'd kept his portrait right beside photos of Jesus and John Fitzgerald Kennedy over her
bed. More than anything I wanted to help the Movement that had meant so much to her, to do something for
him,
since I was, as I said, a man of no consequence at all.

“It's good to see young people like yourself helping out,” the minister said. “How old did you say you were?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Relax, there's no need to be nervous. Tell me, what exactly do you
do
around here?”

“Whatever needs doing. Sometimes it's filing,” I said. “Other times it's taking notes at meetings and getting out flyers. For the last week I've been chauffeuring your wife to speeches on the North Side and sticking around evenings to help Amy watch the apartment. It gives me a chance to catch up on my studies.”

“You're in school, then?”

“I was … until last year. I left when my mother passed.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, nodding. “And your father—”

“I never knew him.”

He glanced away, clearing his throat. “What were you working on? In school, I mean.”

“Philosophy.”

All at once his eyes brightened, as if I'd called the name of an old friend. “When there's time,” he said, “you should let me look over some of your papers. It's been a while since I've had a chance to put everything aside and freely discuss ideas. Who were you reading?”

“I left off with Nietzsche.”

From the distaste on his face, the deep frown, one would have thought I'd said I was studying the Devil.

“Have you read Brightman?”

“Not yet.”

“Do,” he urged. “No one else makes perfect sense to me. Get the Nietzsche out of your system. He's seductive for children—all that lust for power—but he's really the one
we're fighting against.” He stood up, reaching into his wrinkled suitcoat slung over the back of a bedside chair for a pack of cigarettes. “Think about it.”

“I will, sir, except right now we've got something … pretty strange outside.”

“Strange?” He pursed his lips. “You didn't say anything about strange before. Let me have it.”

“I think you need to see him for yourself.”

Wearily, he pulled on his wrinkled suitcoat, then his shoes. I could see that the short nap had helped not at all. The grumbling of his belly told me he must be hungry, that he hadn't eaten a decent meal in a day and a half, but checking the flat's refrigerator, which never kept anything cold, would have to wait until he faced the unsettling reason I'd disturbed his slumber. Another leader, I knew, might have sent me away, calling attention to his trials, his suffering, his fatigue. For King that was out of character. Too many times he'd said, “It is possible for one to be self-centered in his self-sacrifice”—in other words, to use the pain of performing the Lord's work to seek pity and sympathy. No, he never dwelled upon himself, and, although tired, he buttoned his suitcoat and stepped with jelly-legged exhaustion from the darkened bedroom, forcing his lips into a smile as he followed me down the hallway to the living room.

Waiting in the kiln-hot kitchen, seated in a straight-backed chair, was Amy. I felt her presence before my eyes found the imprint of the simple cross under her white blouse, her denim skirt, and the Afro, an aureole black as crow's feathers, framing her face. She kept pushing a pair of black, owl-frame glasses back up the narrow bridge of her nose—a student's gesture, I'd thought during the first few weeks when she volunteered for the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. Her voice was low and smoky.
Some nights it ran rill-like through my head. She was a Baptist, raised since the age of six by her grandmother on Chicago's South Side after the death of her mother following a beating—one of many—from her father, who worked for the railroad and gambled away his meager earnings at the race track. Thus it was her grandmother—Mama Pearl, as she called her—who'd taken care of Amy. Earlier that summer she'd invited Mama Pearl to drop by the Lawndale flat and meet the minister. And so she did, wheezing up the stairs, crepitations like crackling cellophane sounding in her chest with each breath, struggling with her body's adipose freight, hauling a brown weathered handbag big enough for a child to crawl into, and announced, “Usually I don't go nowhere on the third. That's when my husband comes.” For a second she watched King mischievously, then said, “You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?”

He shook his head.

“I calls my disability check my husband, it comes on the third,” and she cackled wildly. The staff fell in love with her that day, with her feathery wig that knocked twenty years off her total of seventy-eight, with the way she worked her toothless mouth like a fish while listening to King explain his plans in Chicago, bobbing her head and asking, “Is you, really?” with her head pushed forward, wig askew, and feet planted apart in two shapeless black shoes. She was utterly unselfconscious. Egoless, and flitted round the flat as though she had feet spun from air. Descending like twin trees from her checkered dress were two vein-cabled legs, lumpy in places, bowed, but it was her voice that everyone remembered most. Thinking she might be thirsty, I offered her a soda, which she declined, shaking her head and explaining, “Thank you, dah'ling, I'm tickled, but I bet' not drink no pop, I might pee on myself.” Her bag was filled with
medicine for her heart and high blood pressure, ills of which she was heedless, saying, “Naw, I ain't supposed to eat salt, but I eats it anyway. I eats
any
thing.”

In point of fact, Mama Pearl was everybody's grandmother. “There wasn't nothin' I didn't do in the fields,” she said, speaking of her childhood in southern Illinois. Now she lived on Stony Island in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month walkup with no running water, where she passed her time crocheting (she gave the minister a quilt she'd worked on for two years), “eye-shopping” (as she put it) in downtown stores, and fishing, which was her passion. She'd go with what she called another “senior” or Amy, having her granddaughter lug along a bulging bag of fried chicken, cookies, grapes and peaches, a few ribs, and a thermos. For Mama Pearl fishing was a social event, one to be shared as you ate and talked and played whist. Standing ankle-deep in the water, she'd throw out her line, but was almost too afraid of saltwater worms to slice and bait them (they were hairy and huge and had serrated teeth like a saw). During her afternoon at the flat, she brought forth from her enormous bag three canisters of her own home-cooked raspberry, apricot, and cinnamon rugelach, which she distributed to the entire staff. She inspected everything, involved herself with everyone, including me (“Now, you don't mind my bein' nosy, do you, Matthew? I was jes ovah there talkin' to that light-skinned fellah and he didn't mind”), and giggled like a young girl, “Ain't I somethin'?” Before leaving she collected SCLC stationery as souvenirs for the other “seniors” in her church and, waving good-bye at the door, assured us all that “I had a re-e-e-al fine time.”