Dreamer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the books and people without whom this novel could not have been written. Of special importance are Stephen B. Oates’s superb Let the Trumpet Sound, David L. Lewis’s King: A Critical Biography, Lerone Bennett Jr.’s What Manner of Man, Coretta Scott King’s My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., James H. Cone’s Martin & Malcolm & America, John J. Ansbro’s Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind, Keith D. Miller’s Voice of Deliverance, David Garrow’s three-volume Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, Mark Lane’s Code Name Zorro, James Earl Ray’s Who Killed Martin Luther King? John A. Williams’s The King God Didn’t Save, Julius Lester’s Search for the New Land, Noel Leo Erskine’s King Among the Theologians, volumes 1 and 2 of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James R. Ralph Jr.’s “Home Truths: Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement” (American Visions, Aug./Sept. 1994).

I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to my agent, Anne Borchardt, for her brilliant advice; Dr. Rudolph Byrd for taking me to King’s birth home; poet Sharon Bryan for accompanying me to the King Memorial at the Lorraine Motel; Joyce Carol Oates for providing the Henry Adams definition of politics; Dr. Ricardo J. Quinones for placing in my hands a copy of his invaluable book, The Changes of Cain; Eknath Easwaran for his voluminous writings on the life of the spirit; to Guy Murchie’s The Seven Mysteries of Life; philosopher Scott Kramer for helping me remember the ’60s; poet Ethelbert Miller and filmmaker Jon Dichter for spiritual support; Gray Cassidy for his martial-arts expertise; Janie Smith for her hours spent typing the manuscript; and my wife, Joan, for her bottomless knowledge about the Book.

MEISTER ECKHART

“The Pauper has to die before the Prince can be born.”

GENESIS 4:5

“But unto Cain and to his offering the Lord had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., Strength to Love

“If you sow the seeds of violence in your struggle, unborn generations will reap the whirlwind of social disintegration.”

GENESIS 37:19-20

“Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say: Some evil beast hath devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”