Dreamer

8

“Luther King, I’ve been tryin’ to get to you for twelve years.” From Dodge Avenue to Howard Street, the old man sat hunched between us, the corners of his mouth tucked in, his fists closed tight on his knees. His stomach rumbled now and then, like thunder. You’d have thought he’d forgotten we were in the car. Every so often he coughed with a deep, rattling sound and held his chest. Neither Amy nor I could prompt him to say what was wrong, and to be perfectly honest I was afraid he might have heart failure right there in the backseat of the car. Smith pressed his fingers to his lips, signaling us not to rush him, to let the old man take as much time as he needed. There were burn scars on his wrists and the back of his hands; part of his right thumb was missing, stumped off by, I supposed, an industrial or down-home farming accident.

At last, after blowing his nose again — two ringing toots and a rest — and sticking his thumb in his mouth to line up his teeth, the old man said, “You don’t know me, but I know who you are.” He reached into his suitcoat and removed a black leather wallet. Out of that he pulled two dog-eared black-and-white photographs and passed them to Smith. In one snapshot, he, as a younger man, posed against the Ferris wheel and booths of the St. Louis World’s Fair, his arm encircling a black woman of catastrophic beauty: sloe-black eyes, high cheekbones, hair falling on her shoulders and along the tight lace collar of her dress. A second photo presented the same woman in a wedding dress, her waist so small a man could make a circle with his hands around it. She was smiling shyly at the camera, caught by surprise, cutting a three-tiered cake with two colored figurines on the top layer, and for a moment I was startled by how she favored Smith. Looking at our passenger again, comparing his features to Chaym’s when we passed streetlights that briefly lit the car’s interior, I was all but certain he was Smith’s father.

“That’s my Ida,” said the old man. “We got married in nineteen twenty-three. Let me tell you, this city was the place to be in the twenties. Ida loved dancin’ in them clubs on Saturday night. And the music? It’s like they say, Reverend. Back then a peckerwood woulda give anythin’ to be a colored man on the weekends. But that was ‘fore the war come along and times got tighter’n Dick’s hatband … We joint the Moorish Zionist Temple along about then. The first year we was there the leader of that temple run off with my wife.”

“I’m sorry.” Smith handed back his photos just as we reached the address he’d given as his home, the Hotel Sutherland on lower Wabash, a flophouse where beds rented for a dollar a night, in a neighborhood of abandoned cars stripped of their antennas and tires, where steam issued from open sewers, sidewalks were shattered into mosaics of white cement, bow-tied Muslims waved Muhammad Speaks, panhandlers wearing do-rags under porkpie hats hawked cheap watches banded from their bony wrists to their fore-arms, and the stain of industrial smoke and soot spread across broken windows, broken doors, and broken walls scrawled with the graffiti of street gangs. “I can see that hurt you a great deal. I could say a prayer for you—”

“Don’t bother.” The old man stepped out onto the curb when I opened the rear door and held it for him. “I don’t want nothin’ anymore. Y’all took it all. Ministers like you are responsible for all my troubles.”

My scalp trembled when he said that. Where, I wondered, had I heard those words before. And then — too late! — I knew: Izola Curry had said just that before stabbing King.

From inside his coat the old man withdrew a nickel-plated, Colt semiautomatic, pointing the ancient pistol straight-armed at Smith, who instinctively threw up his left hand and tried to turn away. The old man pulled the trigger over and over, pumping five rounds into the backseat. The muzzle flash blinded me; then I saw Smith dancing like a marionette on the cushion as the old man emptied his gun, firing, spiderwebbing the windows, frosting them with bullets that ricocheted crazily around the car like bees. Amy dived under the dashboard. Brass casings rained on the roof of the Chevelle, the curb, and one, burning hot, seared my forehead. Pedestrians were ducking into doorways. After the first shot, my ears were cottoned. Deaf. Sounds were muted like voices submerged in the sea, and all I remember after I froze was the old man bolting into the hotel, leaping over a derelict sprawled dead drunk in the lobby, and Amy, her hair sopping with blood, cranking the starter and Smith yelling at me to get the hell into the car and at her to drive to the Nest.

“No!” I was leaning over him, unclear how I’d climbed back into the moving car. “You need a doctor.” Blood spread on his white dress shirt. The seat cushions. On me. The back of the car was peppered with bullet holes. The floor littered with hot casings. The air thick with the sweet, pungent odor of gunpowder. The blood in back was enough for a butchering.

Smith, holding his side, tried to sit up, then stopped. “Ho, Lawd! That hurts!”

“We have to find a hospital—”

“Been in too many hospitals. I don’t wanna see no more hospitals long as I live.”

“How about a mortician? That’s what you’ll need if we don’t get you to Cook County.”

“Fine, but no hospitals.”

Already his eyes were starting to slick over, to blur. He was slipping into shock. “Do like I said. I been shot at before. That jacket’ll stop the bleeding.”

“Matthew!” Though she was yelling, I could barely hear her. “We have to get him to a doctor.”

“Do what he wants. It’s his life.”

She made a sound not to be deciphered.

I tore off my jacket, tied it around the entrance and exit wounds. With my palms I kept applying pressure until the bleeding subsided. By then, Smith had passed out. But before he lost consciousness, he’d been thinking more clearly than Amy or I. Hospitals were risky. There would be too many questions. Too many police. Too many reporters saying the minister had been shot by … another black man. How the Chicago campaign’s opponents would love that. We needed time to regroup. Amy headed for the freeway. I thought she was about to go into shock, barreling down Route 51, driving on adrenaline. She squeezed one fist into her mouth to keep from crying. Outside Champaign, she stopped to give me the wheel when the image of the pistol firing repeatedly rose up unbidden in her mind, forcing her to the side of the road. She cut off the engine and sobbed. “I never thought this would happen. I can’t do this. I can’t.”

I climbed into the driver’s seat, though I was hardly in better shape than she (sounds still came to me flattened, as if from far away). In Pinckneyville we stopped for bandage compresses, gauze, items to fight off infection. “Listen,” I said, “if not for Chaym, that could have been Doc tonight.”

Shortly after daybreak I pulled up in front of the farmhouse. We were tired. Wired. Yet even before we reached the porch, shouldering Smith on both sides, I sensed that something at the Nest was wrong. Footprints not our own led up the front stairs. The door, which I’d locked, was cracked open. Cautiously I kicked it with my heel, and we entered disheveled rooms that looked as if they’d been visited by the Israeli Mossad, followed by the Tontons Macoutes. I thought something in the house had exploded. Clothing was tossed everywhere. Files confettied the floor. Bookshelves were overturned. Cabinets and Mama Pearl’s tables were broken. Amidst this wreckage of her grandmother’s belongings, Amy was silent. And not to be consoled. She looked round the room with something like resignation, slowly and quietly uprighting a steeple-backed chair topped with a wooden fleur-de-lis, and I knew at that moment we had lost her. I got Smith into bed. After washing his wound, I took the first watch, standing vigil over him all that day as he slept.

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.

Up front, Rev. Littlewood swabbed his forehead with a wadded handkerchief. He was a thirtyish, dark-skinned man. Jet black in complexion. He wore brown wing tips and unfashionable, heavy-framed black glasses, the sturdy, hard plastic sort you find sold at Army bases. The body he wore, and traveled about in, was thin, with small, bony wrists, and a voice that sounded seminary-trained, soft and scholarly, so gentle I had to bend forward on my seat when the singing ended and Littlewood walked to the small podium, took a sip of water from a pitcher on the table at his right, then asked his congregation to open the Bibles on the back of each bench and turn to Genesis 4:1—16.

“In this passage,” he said, “we find a terrible story about the sons of Adam and Eve. The younger brother’s murder, which brought death and guilt into our world, is often said to be a prefiguring in the Old Testament of the greater, far grander sacrifice of an innocent who died for our sins at Calvary. For many people — perhaps some of you here today — there is something disturbing in this tale. How can God be just if He rejected one brother’s gifts and exalted the other? The story makes our heavenly Father seem as capricious as any creature conjured from dust and condemned to return to dust.” Littlewood paused, having lost his place momentarily when he peered up to make eye contact. After finding where he left off, he kept a pencil in his right hand to mark his place when he looked again at the congregation. “I can’t believe our Lord is unfair. Remember, it is because He loves the brother who kills that He marks him so no man will do him harm, and it appears none did, for nowhere in the Bible are we told that he dies. And does not God say to the elder brother after rejecting his gift that if thou does well, shalt thou not be accepted? Long ago, in ancient times, the elder brother’s name was interpreted to mean ‘possession,’ and I believe his sacrifice was intended not to honor the Creator but to glorify himself, to win the Lord’s favor like a trophy, or an ornament he might wear. You see, he was given, if not a key to the kingdom, then at least one provocative clue. Oh, a cryptic one, to be sure, but we cannot say that in his moment of dejection he lacked good counsel. His deliverance — and surely ours — is wrapped in the perennial mystery of what that divine counsel, doing well, possibly means. Is there a single answer? I think not. As a question, it is open-ended, admitting of only provisional answers, a riddle that yields an inexhaustible reply, which is cast best not as a clever sentence but rather in the quality of sacrifice and sentience itself.”

Smith squinted all through Littlewood’s sermon, the look on his face skeptical, and he coughed when he heard something questionable. He took out his gum and stuck the wad on the bottom of his seat. I could not tell what he was thinking, though I would have wagered he’d forgotten more about Scripture and the world’s spiritual traditions than the young Rev. Liytlewood ever knew. After the sermon, Bethel’s pastor asked for contributions to help with the church’s remodeling. A silver plate was passed around. Then the congregation sang once more—“Grant Us Light”—and the days service ended, and a tired Rev. Littlewood positioned himself outside the entrance to shake hands with his tiny flock as they left, ask about their health and their children, and tease the little ones, each of whom he gave a candy cane wrapped in plastic.

When Smith and I reached the door, he said, “I noticed you two gentlemen when you arrived. Thank you for coming. I certainly hope you’ll come again. Were you thinking of joining, Mr. … uh …”

“Chaym Smith. No, I didn’t come to join anything.”

“Do you live around here?”

“For the time being. It’s temporary, like everything.”

“Are you a Christian, Mr. Smith?”

Smith chuckled. “You want the truth?”

“Yes, always.”

“Well, the truth is, I don’t know what I am, and I like it that way. Leaves me lots of room to be surprised every day.”

“That’s too bad. As you can see, it wouldn’t hurt if we had a few more people here.”

“Looks like you could use a decent gardener too. Whoever you had before didn’t know jack about landscaping or planting the right flowers for this climate. You want some goldenseal and blackberry lilies out front.”

Littlewood sighed. “Yes, you’re right. I’d do it, except I work at the bank in town. I have to. My salary is … nominal. We need someone to finish the work my predecessor, Reverend McCluskey, started on what was to be the library and a schoolroom for the children. And I wish to God we had someone good to keep up the grounds.”

“We could do that.”

I blurted out, “We?”

“The exercise will do you good, Bishop. The last carpenter they had here didn’t know the first thing about framing.”

“Could you?” Littlewood’s eyebrows raised. “I can’t tell you what a great help that would be to us. My problem is, we can’t afford to pay much,”

“I’m probably not worth much. Whatever you give me is fine.”

“We all have worth,” insisted Littlewood. “If you look in Psalms—”

“Pardon me, Reverend, like I said, I can keep this place up. Thing is, you’re better off, though, if you save the sermons — and all them explanations — for Sunday morning. Is that a deal?”

Littlewood laughed. “I’m hardly in a position to refuse anyone’s help.” He thrust out his right hand. “You have a deal, Mr. Smith.”

Were it not for my debt to Smith, and my concern for his recovery, I would have protested his shanghaiing me into involuntary servitude at Bethel AME. Every few weeks I would receive a postcard from Amy detailing the new job she found at Operation Breadbasket, and ending Miss you. She was all I thought about during the afternoons Smith and I cleared Bethel’s small cemetery, and when we pitched in on the weekends to finish the remodeling left undone and restore areas of the church in ill repair. (Yes, he volunteered me for that too.)

Bethel’s cemetery was centuries old. A boneyard overgrown with pickerelweed and wildflowers that obscured shovel-shaped headstones and weathered markers that leaned at angles. Names and dates for the dead, I noticed, were all but obliterated. Here and there I could make out epitaphs for Amy’s family. We spent the better part of a week ripping out overgrown bushes, moist, matted neckweeds, thistles and brambles, trimming back trees and hauling away barrels of trash. By dusk each day Smith and I worked until we were too tired to stand, with me perspiring so hard you could tell where I’d been standing because there I left a puddle, like some of me had melted away.

I decided this was too much — all this work — regardless of what I owed him for saving my life. In other words, he was doing this to work out his own demons, and all that bedeviled me was the distance between me and Amy.

“Chaym,” I said one evening. “I’m going back to the city for a while. There’re things I need to do there. Do you think you’ll be okay?”

He gave me a headshake. “Do what you gotta do, Bishop. One thing I’ve always believed, you don’t have to do what anybody else does. Only what you have to do. Ain’t no two people on this planet got the same fuckin’ dharma.”

While I cannot speak with authority on the esoteric subject of dharma, I can tell you that I was on the first Chicago-bound Illinois Central the very next day, sitting almost alone in a big, clanking coach, on a hard, cushionless seat as the endless cornfields whipped by outside the train’s unwashed, thick windows. And because Smith always seemed so obsessed with the story of Adam’s two sons, I sat reading a book on them, one I’d borrowed from the college in Carbondale, while the train chuffed and rumbled upstate. In very little time I was lost in this volume that showed how Cain’s lineage was legion. In the Beowulf poem, Grendel’s mother was his child. Down through history, the tribe of Cainites was identified, variously, as that of blacks or Jews who, I recalled, were forced to wear a “mark” by the Nazis (the color black, of course, was its own mark). But by the time Lord Byron wrote his three-act play on the world’s first murderer and outcast, Cain was beginning to transmogrify from a figure of evil to one of righteous, tragic singularity, and it was Abel — the obedient, unoriginal son — who began to seem flawed and lacking in selfhood. As I read, I trembled, suddenly realizing how ubiquitous Cain, the metaphysical revolutionary, truly was. He was there in so many novels I’d only haphazardly read, from Hesse’s Demian to Steinbeck’s East of Eden, from Miguel Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez to Melville’s Billy Budd, and in numerous films I’d enjoyed, such as Shane (another name for Cain), and The Time Machine, where the Morlocks were descendants of Cain and the Eloi were hapless Abelites (read: dinner). Thinking of another classic Western, The Magnificent Seven, it struck me that the besieged Mexican farmers in that film were Abelites through and through, and the gunmen — the down-and-out murderers — who volunteered to save them were all homeless Cainites on the run (except for one, the young Mexican gunfighter manqué played by Horst Buchholz, who was fleeing from the sterility and boredom of his Abelite roots, but by the movie’s end embraced it for the love of a village woman), with Yul Brynner saying of the farmers in the movie’s last line to Steve McQueen, “We lost. We always lose.”

Slowly, by the time the train reached Champaign, I began to see — as if a veil had lifted — the tortured shadow of Cain everywhere, within me and without, his many cultural reincarnations parading through my mind like frames projected on a cyclorama. He was the first city-builder. Perhaps the father of science and philosophy. His war was with God, the Father who spurned him. Of the two — him and Abel — only Cain possessed subjectivity. A complex inner life. It was said that Western man himself was Cain, cursed with the burden of restlessness and the endless quest for selfhood. Down through the centuries, his name was spelled differently in different times. Caym, Kaym, even Chaym, were etymological variations on it.

When I got off the train, lugging my backpack, I felt strange, a bit like a rootless wanderer myself as I boarded a crowded city bus that passed near my studio apartment on the South Side. Beside me on an empty seat I found another rider’s discarded Sun-Times and tried to read a story about Pablo Picasso’s design for a fifty-foot sculpture planned for the plaza in front of the new Civic Center, but from the rear of the bus, on the backseat, a group of Brillo-haired black boys began cursing and laughing way too loud for the comfort of other passengers. They were swapping tales about white people, each one trying to top the others on whether Jews, southern crackers (or northern whites), or Asians mistreated blacks the worst. And then, as if to remind me how much I’d lost the rhythms of the city while at the Nest, they began to sing:

Jingle bells, shotgun shells,

Freedom all the way,

Oh what fun it is to blast

A trooper man away …

I had not been in Chicago in months. I had forgotten how deeply hatreds ran here. I was out of touch with this big-shouldered, frontierlike city onto which King had futilely tried to graft the transcendent ideals of Gandhi. Although Chicago was nearly fifty percent black, and was first settled by a Haitian black man (Jean-Baptiste Du Sable) who built his cabin on the north bank of the Chicago River in 1772, all the gleaming buildings and skyscrapers I saw as my bus moved through the Loop, all the twenty-story department stores and high-hat restaurants, the smoking factories, stockyards, movie theaters and museums, libraries, playhouses, radio and television stations, amusement parks and stadiums, were owned by white people, as if the Negro was hugely in this Second City but hardly of it. Here, he could be deeply in ward politics, yet where was his economic power, the font from which real politics sprang? Back in the city, I began to feel what Smith called the singular Negro emotion. Envy. It came upon me, like a cold or a summer flu, when I stepped down from the bus and onto the sidewalk two blocks from the building I’d lived in before the riots, as if I’d fallen or been flung into an already finished world, one where people like me would never, ever fit.

At my building on the South Side, I climbed three flights, hoping no one had broken into my place. I walked down the musty hallway past the communal toilet to my studio apartment — one large room attached to a kitchenette — and turned the key in the lock and entered my city-cave. I wanted to call Amy immediately. But when I switched on the light I was staggered by what I saw. The air felt tight, dead. Months had passed since I’d seen this room with its lumpy Salvation Army sofa, a coffee table I’d picked up at a church rummage sale, and bookcases constructed from cinder blocks and planks of wood. We’d left so quickly for southern Illinois when King okayed Smith’s training that my studio was exactly as I’d left it. Dishes caked with Chinese takeout were piled in the sink. Roaches scattered along the counter and cabinets. On the floor by my sofa were pamphlets and application forms for Roosevelt and Columbia College, where I’d planned to reapply, if I could only find financial aid. That, I recalled, had pretty much been my life before Smith appeared: shifting constantly between prayer and economic panic, waging a kind of one-man War on Poverty (my own), because for all President Johnson’s promises, and all the ink he’d used signing into law the Civil Rights Act (he went through seventy-two pens), I was always broke. I dropped my backpack inside the door, closed it quietly, and fell onto the sofa, realizing that if anyone had broken into my place, they would have found precious little worth stealing — nothing, that is, unless they hoped to pawn my five-volume set of the Summa Theologica, boxes of notebooks, or my back issues of Mind.

Except for books and a closet of threadbare clothing, I owned nothing. (And even this pitiful studio was a Winter Palace compared with many places where blacks lived.) I wondered: if the minister was right in saying we must not think about what we might get but rather what we might give in a relationship, then what in this world could I offer Amy Griffith? How could I serve her? Looking around this room, I saw what a poor catch I was. Very unhip. An old fuddy-duddy at (now) age twenty-five when American culture in the mid-’60s was becoming so fluid, so polymorphous you could change your identity — reinvent yourself — as easily as you restyled your hair. It was the first truly theatrical decade. A moment when role-playing and how things appeared took primacy over reality (and who, after all, knew what that was anymore?). And me? In this world of flux, I was cursed with a shy, Victorian personality, one Smith’s powerful presence had begun to change when I fell into his orbit; but away from him, back in Chicago in my dismal room, I felt again like a moon unmoored. As a colored man raised in the 1950s, I’d learned the hard way to guard my emotions, particularly when I was around white people. I was stiff and proper. Formal and guided by religious principles almost everyone around me (except for King) regarded as obsolete. On the dance floor I drew a blank. (What the hell was “The Bop” anyway?) In social situations I was easy to lose. Or shout down. I tried to be polite, as my mother had taught me (and the minister urged us to do), by patiently listening closely to other people and letting them finish their thoughts, no matter how long that might take, but most often they cut me off or interrupted me in midsentence since I was not an imposing presence and I often quoted from literature or philosophy to reinforce my point, so what I usually had to say went unfinished until I reached home and pulled out my journal and, in the privacy of my studio, completed my end of the conversation there. Hadn’t Amy once told me that in a movie I’d make a good prop? That together the best we would ever create was mud? Slowly it dawned on me that perhaps her postcards of the last few months were not declarations returning the love I felt for her, but simply examples of her kindness, the sort Amy might show to anyone she pitied.

If that was so, how could I call her?

Two weeks passed before I mustered up the courage to pick up the phone. I busied myself with cleaning the refrigerator and stove, filling out college applications, and at last when I could stall no longer, I picked up the phone and dialed her extension at work.

“You’re here, Matthew?” In the background I heard the voices of other Operation Breadbasket workers, “What about Chaym?”

“He’s downstate. I think hell be okay. Uh, listen … I was thinking if you’re not busy tonight, maybe we could go out for dinner, then take in a show—”

“No.”

“Oh …” I should have known.

“There’s somewhere special I want to go.”

“Where?”

“It’s a new place I’ve been hearing about. Some of the people I work with here have been raving about it, but only black people can get inside. Can you pick me up at five when I get off work?”

“Sure. I’ll rent a car. But, Amy, where are we going?”

“It’s on the West Side, not far from where I used to live. I don’t know much about it, Matthew, but I think it’s called the Black People’s Liberation Library.”