Dreamer

10

On the floor of their living room in Atlanta, with the rugs rolled back into a corner and furniture pushed to one side, he was wrestling with his children, pinning Dexter’s arms while Marty, one arm around his neck, rode his hack in an effort to topple him so both boys could get the upper hand. Away to the left in his workroom the phone rang and rang. His wife looked on from the hallway, shaking her head. Can’t you find somewhere else to play with these kids? The tussle, which had gone on for ten minutes of giggling and tickling, was the first good wrestling bout he’d had with the children since they left Chicago; in fact, it was the first time they’d had his undivided attention in weeks, so he was hardly about to stop.

They were happy to he home again, the wretched flat on South Hamlin just a horrible memory now, a place that all summer long drained the gaiety from his children and epressed his wife. No, moving them there was what the Movement required at the time, hut he swore he would never. God willing, subject them to that sort of hardship again. If he regretted anything about his life, it was the way the Cause took such a devastating toll on his personal life and the roles he cherished the most, those of father and husband. Every so often he felt tempted to call his schedule suicide on the installment plan. The crowds and faces ran together. On so many mornings he awoke in a different hotel in a strange city, and for a few bewildering moments he sat up in bed wondering where on earth he might be. And the meals his admirers served him? How they played hob with his waistline! He remembered one in particular — the food itself, not the occasion or his hosts. There was a hundred-year-old bottle from Oporto, lobster on Canton china as thin as a wafer, frittura mista, and pale game served so ingeniously, so artfully, it looked as though each slice had been cut from butter. Yet, if the truth be known, he preferred catfish, pigs’ feet, and collard greens. At least at home now he could relax for a little while and eat whatever he pleased. And, thank God, he didnt have to shave. Daily use of the lye-based depilatory powder his sensitive skin required often left his face tender, smarting and feeling raw, stinging in the outdoor air. But now that they were back in Atlanta, he knew his tortured skin would have a few days to heal.

His children were calling, beckoning him back from his workroom, where he’d finally hurried to answer the phone, to the living room and the makeshift handball court they’d created by pushing back furniture and rolling up the rug. His work space was on the same floor, a back room where his gray metal desk was barricaded in by a file cabinet, a confusion of boxes, shelves loaded down with books, his notes for Where Do We Go from Here? mounds of correspondence, and the phone he held burning against his ear. His hands began to shake as he listened, thinking how when he awoke each morning he could never know what new catastrophe awaited him, what novel, Job-like species of pain hunkered in the shadows, or what manner of crisis, personal or political, he would be put through next. On the other end, as his Marty and Dexter shouted for him to join in their game, the agent in the Atlanta office was reporting almost gleefully the latest bounty the Bureau learned had been placed on his head.

Usually, he suspected, they didn’t call when they discovered someone bent upon killing him. The policy was, he was sure, to simply sit back, wait, and see if the assassin made good on his promise. But this was different. The amount to be collected for killing him was $50,000. “Pretty high, eh?” the agent said. “Bet you didn’t know you were worth that much …”

Even on his best day he didnt believe himself worth that much. Or the staggering smear campaign Hoover launched in 1964, aimed at exposing him, as the director put it, as “the most notorious liar in the country” and removing him from “the national picture.” His agents maintained a two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta’s Peach Street Towers filled with surveillance equipment, and kept a man in the place twenty-four hours a day, monitoring every call he made or received. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’d approved the first wiretaps on his home and offices (though not the fourteen microphone surveillances that came later) after his brother, the president, expressed grave concern over the help the SCLC received from Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell. He remembered that conversation well. Kennedy invited him to the White House and during a stroll in the Rose Garden said, “They’re Communists, you’ve got to get rid of them. If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too — so we’re asking that you be careful.” He’d left that meeting convinced that Hoover’s office, not Kennedy’s, was the center of power in Washington. And that office was determined to see him dead.

Having hung up, having forced himself to say, “Thank you for the information,” he closed his workroom door and slumped onto the chair in front of his desk. Suddenly he felt too tired to play with the children. Too tired to move. The call had washed away all his strength. For an instant he felt dizzy and lowered his head onto a pile of week-old letters begging for his attention. He’d faced death so many times before — the bomb that exploded in Room 30, his room at the Gaston Motel during the Birmingham campaign, flashed through his memories. But this? Oh, this new threat was something else. This plan to kill him had been hatched in Imperial, Missouri, at the home of John Sutherland, who was putting up the money. He was a Virginian, a product of military schools and a descendant of the Pilgrims; he stood firmly against the Movement, so much so that he founded the St. Louis Citizens Council and served in an antiblack organization of businessmen called the Southern States Industrial Council. As the agent told it, Sutherland knew an underworld figure named John Kauffmann, a drug dealer and operator of the Bluff Acres Motel, where stolen cars were dropped off occasionally by nickel-and-dime thugs of his acquaintance. One of them was Russel Byers. His brother-in-law John Paul Spica was serving a murder sentence in the Missouri State Penitentiary, sharing a cell with a penny-ante crook named James Earl Ray. Byers, the agent said, made one of his calls on Kauffmann that fall of 1966, and the motel owner asked him if he’d like to make some money. Sure would, Byers said. Then there’s someone, replied Kauffmann, I think you ought to meet.

He drove the car thief to Sutherland’s place. The Virginian met them at the door, wearing a Confederate colonel’s cap. He invited them into his den, festooned with a rug imprinted with the Stars and Bars and a huge Rebel flag on one wall. There, Sutherland informed them he represented a covert southern group with deep pockets. They would pay $50,000 to anyone who killed the “big nigger” from Atlanta. Was he interested? Byers listened politely, then said he needed a while to think aver the offer. There was little chance he would accept, said the agent — Byers knew danger when he saw it — but in the underworld of Kauffmann, Byers’s brother-in-law, and Ray, it was widely known that an open contract had been issued for King’s head.

It was, he knew, only a matter of time before someone collected that bounty. Pushing aside the papers on his desk (his aides told him he’d already generated close to 200,000 pages of documents), he found his pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out, searched his pockets for a matchbook, then lit the cigarette, extinguished the match with his thumb and forefinger, and sat back in his chair. How many days did he have left? Or should he be thinking now in terms of hours? Maybe minutes? What should a man do when at any moment he might be struck down?

He knew.

If he might not see tomorrow, then what he wished for most was to receive forgiveness from those he’d failed, beginning with his children. And his wife. Whatever failures there were in their marriage he blamed on himself, for no man could have asked for a better partner to share his life since 1952. She was pursuing her music career — as a singer of exceptional talent — at the New England Conservatory when they met in Boston. Yes, she’d heard of him before they met, and her impressions were not favorable. In Boston he was known for the brilliant sermons he delivered at local churches, but Coretta had reservations about the Baptist ministers she’d met. They were so … emotional, and she was hoping to align herself with a less fundamental, more liberal approach to religion. Added to that, the stuffiness of so many Baptist ministers bothered her. And wasn’t this M. L. King just a little too popular with the women in town? She’d heard he was brilliant, and had been accepted at Edinburgh University for graduate work (though Yale turned him down); he brought together other students at his place on St. Botolph Street for meetings of what they dubbed “The Dialectical Society,” at which they as well as their professors presented papers. She’d also heard he was playful, a good dancer and a party boy, a tease who dressed to the nines — a real ladies’ man, by most accounts, and Boston’s most eligible young black bachelor. It was with some reservation, then, that she surrendered to the matchmaking of her friend Mary Powell, who was married to the nephew of his former teacher, Benjamin Mays at Morehouse, and ate at the Western Lunch Box, an eatery specializing in down-home cooking, where black students — he among them — gathered to relax and talk. Mary warned him that Coretta might not be religious enough for his temperament, but at that point in his life he was frustrated by the women he was meeting. The woman he hoped to marry, he told Mary, must have four characteristics: character, intelligence, personality, and beauty. Mary, saying nothing, simply gave him Coretta’s phone number.

When he picked her up in his green Chevy on the Huntington Avenue side of the conservatory — she with her coat buttoned to her throat and wearing a scarf, thinking of the struggles and sacrifices that had brought her from a culturally deprived background to Antioch and at last to her training here — her first thought when his car pulled up had been, Oh my God, look what a runt he is. (In point of fact, he was 166½ pounds that year, 66½ inches tall, and had a blood pressure of 134/64.) To her he at first seemed full of the slick, superficial language — the jive — of black men with only one thing on their minds. But no. As they spent time together that afternoon, in the cold rain of a January afternoon, she began to see deeper into his passion for Continental theology and his people’s deliverance. He was working that term, he said, in directed study with Professor DeWolf on a paper he would entitle “Karl Barth’s Conception of God,” and as he discussed his conclusions with her he grew more animated, explaining that Barth’s God was too removed from man, wholly Other, which he found unacceptable; but there was much in so-called crisis theology that, in his view, corrected liberal Protestantism’s sentimentalization of man. They sat in Sharaf’s Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, eating a cafeteria-style lunch. He put down his fork and leaned closer toward her, saying, “Maybe man is more a sinner than liberals are willing to admit.” In his paper’s conclusion he planned to question liberalisms naïve, ivory-tower belief in progress. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever-present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.” Talking on, waving his fork then, he watched her closely for her reaction, and was pleased by her attention and her bobbing her head in agreement when he said, “The word sin has to come back into our vocabulary. One hoary meaning of the word is ‘to miss the mark,’ as when an arrow goes astray. I like that. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said.

Yes, he was far more than she’d expected.

And he could not keep his eyes off her. That day she was wearing bangs with a natural wave. That he liked. Indeed, he liked everything about her, even though he knew he would have to confront Daddy King head-on — a thing he dreaded more than anything else — when he brought this stunning woman, who was not one of Ebenezer’s own, home and introduced her as his fiancée. “You,” he told her, “are my Waterloo.”

No man, he knew, would ever have a better companion by his side. When they were married in Alabama on June 18, 1953, the local Jim Crow laws prohibited them from spending their wedding night in a hotel. Instead they found lodging at a black funeral home. Yes, they had been through much together. As in most traditional, black southern Baptist households, she followed his lead, going so far as to let him tell her how she should dress or when she should fix herself up a little. If these were faults — failures in his understanding of equality — he regretted them, because in those early years of their marriage he felt liberated by her to at last be himself. He owed her that, an intimacy he’d never experienced before, one possible only through the strange alchemy of marriage, where two once separate and distinct histories blended to become a single destiny. True, he learned that this kind of love involved suffering, the extinction of the ego, but the trade-off, especially after the children were born, was his rebirth as a fully communal being, a man working in concert with another for the welfare of his family, which reinforced his passion for politics and social justice. In his later speeches, the ones assailing America’s crass and vulgar materialism, he was fond of saying, “The great problem facing modern man is that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.” What he didn’t say — and now wondered if he should have — was that through Coretta’s love he’d come to know that ecstatic freedom and the fullness of being-with.

He wondered how badly she’d been hurt by the stories about his sexual affairs. There were women all over the country who claimed they’d known his affections. The rumor mill thrived on tales about the Kennedy brothers, or Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, according to a widely circulated and probably false report, unzipped his pants during a White House meeting and dropped his Texas-sized member on the conference table, asking, “Does Ho Chi Minh have one of these?” Because the public loved stones like these about the famous and powerful he was not surprised to hear them said about himself. But did any of his detractors stop once to admit that these stories about his wearing sunglasses and meeting women at a restaurant in Riverdale, and soliciting prostitutes, were all secondhand? Anything that came from the FBI — their saying, for example, that the wife of a California dentist was his mistress — was tainted, given their campaign to discredit him at any cost, first as a Communist, then later as a lecher. In the public’s eyes, however, accusation was equivalent to proof. His wife dismissed them. He could not. They forced him to reconsider the vows he’d taken when he was nineteen. He was by no means an ethical relativist. Indeed, the very thought of that angered him. But maybe — just maybe — what he preached to others was impossible. Surely the commandments applied to him as a Christian minister. It would always be that way. The nonbeliever might not be judged or condemned or hurled into hell, but those who took spiritual vows — and them only — were subject to the narrow system, the “razors edge,” as some called it, of punishment and redemption. Consequence was reserved only for spiritual aspirants. These could not afford the slightest hint of moral failure, not a moment of weakness lest that be used against their cause. How did the old churchwomen put it? Dirt shows the quickest on the cleanest cotton. And if nothing could be found, they would have to live with misdeeds fabricated and passed along to reporters who received “information” on him from the government’s Crime Records Division. And in the horrible tape of a party in his hotel room, which his wife found at the SCLC’s office, mailed by a Bureau agent in November of 1964 from Miami, just thirty-four days before he was to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. He’d been at that raucous party, yes. People there told dirty jokes. A listener could conclude there was sexual activity in the room, but nothing — absolutely nothing — on the tape directly implicated him. His voice could barely be heard in the room. So Hoover ordered his lab to enhance his words a little, and when the supposedly damaging tape reached his wife it came with a letter that said: “Look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes … You could have been our greatest leader … But you are done … There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Many nights when he lay beside his wife, unable to sleep, he did want to put a gun to his head. To his congregation he’d said, “There is a Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll in us,” and not once did he exclude himself from the realm of sinners, though more than anything else in this world he wanted to be a good man.

One thing — one poem — often steadied him during these nights of despair, lines composed four centuries earlier by his (and his father’s) namesake, Martin Luther:

This life, therefore

is not righteousness

but growth in righteousness

not health but healing

not being but becoming

not rest but exercise.

We are not yet what we shall be

but we are growing toward it.

The process is not yet finished

but it is going on,

this is not the end

but it is the road.

All does not gleam in glory

but all is being purified.

Dexter cracked open his workroom door, holding a football. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I thought you were done working.”

“I am, but I’m finished,” he said. “At least for now.”

His son crossed the room, grabbing two of his fingers, and began pulling him outside toward the living room to play. He knew he would give his children this time, regardless of whether they kept him away from his work all evening. They were the Lord’s children, after all, and just as he was the channel for the gospel and not its source, he and his wife were merely the children’s temporary custodians. He knew he had let them down time and again. But Scripture said if a man tried — and kept trying — to serve the good, the true, and the beautiful, Providence would not turn its back. No man, he knew, was given burdens too great for him to carry; indeed, the point was to pass beyond the vanity that he, not God, bore that burden, and realize, even if he had to learn it the hard way and at almost a fatal price, that the challenge of the spiritual was simply this: to be good, truly moral, and in control of oneself for this moment only, because what other moment in time could a man be held responsible for?