Dreamer

9

The library was in a poor neighborhood, squeezed between a pool hall and a tavern. To its left was a vacant lot filled with garbage. Children were playing there, knee-deep in refuse the building’s residents dumped from their windows. The smell of decay was overpowering, but no less so than the heartrending sight of black and Puerto Rican families crammed into a building that should have been condemned by the Housing Authority decades before. The El ran right behind the building, rattling its windows. On the first floor, in what had once been a storefront, we found the Black People’s Liberation Library. When I parked directly in front of its door, it was 6 P.M. There were about fifteen people inside, white and black, examining the ceiling-high shelves of books on the library’s back wall. Nothing about this place seemed exceptional, except for its impoverishment.

“It’s supposed to look unimportant,” Amy said. “People at work told me this is just a front. C’mon, we better get inside before they start.”

After checking that the rented car’s doors were locked, I followed her through the entrance. Just inside the door, a young black woman sat at a folding card table, a blackbound register open before her. We signed our names, as she asked us to do, then mingled in the small room with other visitors examining titles on the shelves. I saw seminal works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and dozens of other cultural nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. I noticed several volumes by Yahya Zubena, a prominent local activist who often got his picture in black publications like the Daily Defender and Jet. I’d never seen him, but I knew his story. His real name was Willard Bailey, and he was sentenced to twenty years downstate in Marion Penitentiary for murdering a nineteen-year-old black filling-station attendant during a stickup (Willard had cut off the boy’s genitals and stuffed them in his mouth). But that was only the crime he was convicted for. There were others, ones he wrote about after his release from prison — rape, dozens of rapes on the South Side, with some of his victims being only twelve years old. After them, he moved on to assaulting white women on the North Side. In prison, Willard discovered the pleasures of poetry in a creative writing class, as well as the very texts I’d seen by Du Bois and Garvey. According to his interviews and published essays, he was reborn after those experiences, “baptized in blackness,” as he was fond of saying. He apologized for his crimes in scathing liberation verse that flowed from his prison cell to periodicals like Ramparts. There, a few prominent white authors who published on those same pages declared him too brilliant to be behind bars; they agitated for Yahya’s release, and by 1967 he was back on the streets of Chicago, reading agitprop poetry in Lincoln Park (“Nigger, Nigger, Wake Up!” was his best-known piece), and some said he was organizing street gangs for the Revolution. Amy pulled down one of Yahya’s books and, after pushing her eyeglasses back up her nose with two fingers, began flipping through its pages and frowning. Truth to tell, I found his work puerile, and while I pretended to peruse a copy of The Souls of Black Folks, which I deeply respected, I was actually watching Amy from the corner of my eye, wondering if I’d completely blown my first evening out with her.

Half an hour earlier, I’d picked her up outside the office for Operation Breadbasket. She stepped from the building in a group of chattering black women, but I singled her out instantly — my heart trembled ever so slightly, picking up speed — as did other black men on the street, for Amy, with her bee-stung lips and eyes full of laughter, was so striking that it wasn’t uncommon for brothers to drive their cars right up on the curb to hit on her. She was wearing a simple, beltless blue dress that clung nicely to all her corners and, smiling, handed me a map scrawled on office stationery. I was, of course, tongue-tied during the thirty-minute drive to the library, and just listened as she described her new job, her co-workers, and how enticingly they’d talked about the Liberation Library. To be honest, I’d hoped for a kiss when she got in the car, a chaste peck on the cheek, a hug, or something. Try as I might, I was unable to read her feelings about me. Nor was I reading myself very well that afternoon (We always lose), all of which made me gloomy as I guided the car through rush-hour traffic. There was so much I wanted to say, but I left my thoughts unvoiced, despite my feeling that Amy was always watching me, waiting for me to disappoint her in one of the dozens of ways brothers she’d dated had done before; I always felt she was testing me, and even though we were alone in my car I sensed a chorus line of her erstwhile boyfriends at my elbow, all those black men who’d failed at being faithful, strong, committed to her, aware of her needs; and with my every action I sensed, rightly or wrongly, that I was guilty of their mistakes until I proved otherwise. Only a black American woman could place that burden on a man. Yet it wasn’t simply about her. Or me. No, it was all that painful history behind us, the centuries of black men and women hurting and betraying and possibly hating each other since the days of slavery when a Negro risked death if he defended his family; the damage wrought by centuries of discrimination was always there, right at the heart of something as private as passion, despite pleas for forgiveness and promises to forget the past and make a fresh start. It was about my mother Ellesteen’s bitterness toward my father, that pathetic bastard, after he took off and left her to raise me alone. Oh yes, all that was in the car between us, unspoken and perhaps unspeakable, and I hadn’t the faintest idea in such an uncertain world how we could begin.

“Matthew,’ she said, reeling me back from remembrance, “I think they’re starting.”

White visitors drifted outside, obviously bored by the Liberation Library’s familiar titles. Once the last white person stepped to the street, the young woman at the table stood up and latched the door, locking in the eight blacks who remained. She walked to a section of the bookshelves, reached behind a row of works by Chester Himes — I heard a click — and that section of the shelf swung open into the outer room, as grandfather clocks do in old British movies set in haunted houses. I made an in-suck of breath, as startled as the other black visitors, for behind the tiny room in which we’d waited, there was a larger space, with huge colored maps of every major city in America on the walls, and five rows of folding chairs before a podium.

Yahya Zubena welcomed us inside.

“Matthew,” Amy whispered, “this isn’t what I expected at all. Isn’t he supposed to be in jail?”

“I read in Jet that he got out last year.”

“No one at work told me this was his library.”

Her reaction to him was visceral, the recoil any woman might feel in the presence of a man who, after his prison conversion, confessed in his books that he raped blacks as “practice,” as a warm-up to perfect his technique for whites in the suburbs. But we couldn’t leave. We were locked inside. I had to nudge Amy between her shoulder blades to coax her into entering the back room, but I was so dazed myself I don’t exactly remember walking in, only that Yahya said, “Now that the ofays are gone, we can get down to business.” He ordered us to follow him to a map of Chicago at our left. By any measure, he was a big man — linebacker big — with a Farmer Burns build, full-bearded, and a complexion one shade up from sepia. He wore faded jeans, work boots, and a dashiki of red, black, and green, the colors of Marcus Garvey’s flag. As large as he was, Yahya made the back room’s sparse furnishings feel as flimsy as constructions of pasteboard and papiermâché. In a word, he was one of the darlings of the white media, one of King’s competitors for press coverage, and every parole officer’s worst nightmare.

“Brothers and sisters,” intoned Yahya, “I want y’all to look at that map and tell me whereabouts you live.”

We all did so, indicating addresses in south and west Chicago. That pleased Yahya. He steered our group toward the map of Detroit. “If y’all got relatives there, show me where they live.” A few people pointed toward the heavily industrial portions of the city. Again Yahya smiled. He moved us on from map to map, from Oakland to Harlem, Cleveland to Philadelphia, and each time he asked, “Where do most black people live?” The answer unfailingly was in some urban district near factories and commerce.

“Now, I want y’all to sit down and listen carefully.” He waited until we were all seated on the folding chairs. “I took you through those maps because I wanted you to see for yourself that it ain’t no accident where we live forms a pattern. A concentration camp. We’ve always near highways or factories or warehouses or railroad tracks. Ain’t that so? You might say we’re contained. We’re concentrated in the areas where the Man wants us—away from him. Segregation did that, but from a strategic standpoint it did something else. What you think that is?” Fingers in his beard, he paced, sometimes pausing to stand directly over visitors in the front row where Amy and I sat, looming over us with his face only inches from ours. “I’ma tell you. Being concentrated like that means when y’all start rebelling against your miserable conditions, tearing up the city like you did a year ago, all Charlie’s got to do is move his tanks and trucks and National Guard troops right down the freeways and Illinois Central tracks to your front door.”

“Excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “What about blacks who don’t live there? Aren’t we a little more dispersed than these maps show?”

“I don’t think so, brother. Maybe you better look again, or clean them Coke-bottle glasses of yours.”

A couple behind Amy and me chuckled. The skin on my face tingled. “I was just asking if—”

Yahya scowled me into silence.

There was a pleat between Amy’s brows. “Why are you telling us this?”

“So you can prepare, sistuh.”

“For what?”

Yahya stepped toward her, so close we could smell him; he forced her to look up at him. I felt Amy stiffen. She placed her right hand on top of mine. “Why you think, girl? For the coming race war.”

“I don’t believe there is one coming, not if people of goodwill, white and black, do everything they can to make things better. Until a little while ago, I worked with Dr. King. Right now I work at Operation Breadbasket—”

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.

From this ground of blended anonymous lives, many a world-acclaimed king might arise.

Where I fit into this sanctuary so heavy with black history, I could not say. Before returning to Chicago I’d simply fit myself behind a wheelbarrow, hauling away debris as Smith cleaned and polished the pews, doing and redoing the architrave and shutting stile with a painstaking care I found as hard to fathom as his spontaneous act of volunteering first as a caretaker, then helping to finish the additions left undone, and at last, just as I was leaving, offering to teach one of the Sunday-school classes for Rev. Littlewood, explaining Old Testament stories to Bethel’s wide-eyed children with the skill that only a natural thespian could bring. He told me he planned to act out the tales, taking the parts of Noah and Job and others; he especially enjoyed the opportunity to play a fickle Jehovah with a cruel streak in Him. I knew — just knew—the children would love it. I imagined them cheering during his classes. He even talked about possibly directing the children in biblical plays of their own. But, I wondered, why this sacrifice for a community in which he believed himself an outcast?

The answer and Chaym were waiting for me in the church’s storeroom. I found him cleaning up after a day of painting, for which he was miserably paid, scrubbing turpentine-soaked rags on his trousers, shirt, and portions of his face splattered with Optic White. Looking up, he saw me and winked.

I asked, “You like what you see?”

“Hey now, that’s my line, Bishop. You get your own. But, yeah, I do like what I see. That big Cheshire cat grin means you musta got some trim in Chicago. That’s good. Keep at it, and those pimples on your face might clear up.”

“Watch how you talk about Amy. I was there when you called her. The only reason I’m back here so soon is because she was worried about you.”

“About me? Worried, eh?”

“Yes, I know it sounds strange—”

“Hell, I’m all right. I just got my hands on a li’l gorilla dust last night and thought I saw somethin’ outside. Wasn’t nobody there when I looked again. But I’m straight today, and I am glad to see your ass. You can help me move some of these paint cans upstairs.”

“Uh-uh, no! I’ve done enough work here, and I don’t know why you’re doing it. Did you get religion or something after you got shot?”

“Naw, Bishop,” he said as he leaned back, resting his arms on the bench. “I don’t believe in a blessed thing, including me. I’ll never be one of the faithful. It’s just that I figure work is all I got to offer, even if the ground we till gives back nothing. It don’t matter. I ain’t worried ’bout it bein’ fair. For a li’l while what I do here is just what I’m doin’ and, who knows, it may be beautiful, and maybe nobody won’t know ’bout it, even God, but for a second or two it’ll make a few of the folks who come through here on Sunday happy. I don’t ’spect much more’n that anymore.” He stared as I rubbed my lower back. “What’s the matter? You feel stiff?”

“Some. I just drove for over six hours. Remember?”

“Got just the thing for you. Come with me.”

Smith led me from the storeroom to the platform on which Rev. Littlewood’s pulpit sat. He pushed it back to widen the space where we stood, then spread his feet shoulder width. Closed his eyes. Tucked in his tail, slowly raised his arms chest high, and said, “Do like I’m doing. Keep it slow. Don’t stop. Just flow.”

“I’ve seen this on TV. All those Chinese you see in the park every morning in Peking do this, right?”

“Wrong.” He kept moving, flowing through postures, his weight never equally distributed on both feet. “What they’re doing is a lie, like most things. The Communists under Mao have outlawed all the old, traditional martial arts ’cause they can’t control them, or the genius of those venerable old kung fu masters. But people are practicin’ in secret anyway. So the government concocted the form you seen on TV so the practitioners would have to do it out in the open at the parks — where the government can watch the herd and take names — since that form requires lots of room. What I’m showing you is the real thing done by monks at the Shaolin monastery. You can do it in a shower stall if you adjust your footwork. It don’t take up no more room than that. When you do it, do it riabroi.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, sorry. That’s a Thai word. There’s no English equivalent. I picked it up in Chiang Mai. It’s yours. I’ma give it to you. Riabroi means everything together at once, complete, sensible, beautiful, perfect, and natural. You do this form — or anythin’ else—riabroi and you won’t need me lookin’ after you no more.”

“Looking after me? I’m the one Doc told to—”

“Bishop, shut up and do the form.”

I followed his lead, letting him teach me the twenty-four moves of the (Yang) Tai Chi Chuan form he’d picked up while traveling overseas, making myself slow down more with each posture, each breath, wasting no motion whatsoever, and as I mimicked his movements I began to feel lighter and less fatigued — like water, like wind — though I’m sure if Rev. Littlewood had entered Bethel AME just then, he would have found it puzzling to see two black men, both refugees of the American race wars, doing Taoist-drenched Tai Chi in the Christian sanctuary where generations of right and proper Griffiths had prayed to a god unknown to either Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu.

On our way back to the Nest that evening my anger at him for making me leave Amy was, strange to say, replaced by an ineffable peace. “Do that form three times in a row every day,” he advised, “and you’ll live longer than that colored ex-cowboy in Texas named Charlie Smith I was reading about.” His promise of longevity made me laugh, but I agreed to do as he asked, for had he not proven himself to be, despite his crabbiness and infuriating eccentricities, an experienced guide for those of us, broken-winged, condemned to mediocrity and the margins of the world? All during the ride back I felt this fraternity with him, but I had no idea I was not alone in my admiration.

As I pulled up the road I saw the green Plymouth parked near the farmhouse and two travel-stained men sitting on our porch as if they owned it.

“Watch yourself,” said Smith. “Let me handle this.”

The older of the two men, gourd-shaped with dull egg-blue eyes behind his thick glasses, his tie tucked under his belt, stood up as we got out of the car and came up the foot-path, scratching the side of his head where he needed a shave. He took off his hat. The movement exposed for a second the shoulder holster inside his wrinkled suitcoat and the butt of a snub-nosed.38.

“Evening, Chaym,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I stayed to one side of Smith, my palms beginning to perspire.

“Evening yourself. You fellahs lost?” Smith’s eyes burned into them. “You’re pretty far off the main road—”

“No, this is where we want to be. My name is Jasper Groat and”—he made a twitchlike nod—“my colleague there is Vincent Withersby. We — say, do you think we could talk inside for a little while?”

“Depends on what you want, Mr. Groat.”

“Oh.” Groat laughed and dipped inside his coat; then his palm displayed a shiny, official-looking badge pinned to his wallet. “That’s simple. We want to talk. To offer you a way to make a little money and maybe help your country out during difficult times. That sound good to you? I certainly hope it does. The people we work for are very … interested … in Martin Luther King. Our director thinks your success impersonating King could, urn, be … useful … for one of the projects we’ve been kicking around the office for a coupla years. Couldn’t find the missing piece, though, till you showed up. Damn, you do look like him, you know? Even behind those dark glasses and that beard. You think we might rest a spell inside, put our feet up, and chat awhile?”

To his left, Withersby was packing enough Dunhill tobacco into his Liverpool pipe to last for an hour. Regardless of what we said, they planned to stay So I slid open the screen door, stepped to one side, and bid them enter.