Dreamer

11

“We were pulling for you from the start,” said Groat. He sat at the kitchen table, which he and Withersby had covered with weathered, string-tied portfolios crammed with reams of green-tinted paper. It was the first time I’d seen Groat up close and in strong light. A fat, froggish man, he lifted the soft drink I gave him and drained it in one long swallow. His skin had the texture of rice paper. His sweat smelled oily. Clearly, he did not meet the weight standard set for federal agents, which meant either he or his physician falsified his yearly medical examinations in order to save his job. He talked on for a while in his thick-tongued voice about his arthritis, his recurring knee problems, reciting his weaknesses and defects the way people sometimes do to disarm you, as if to say they know full well their deficiencies and need to mention them before you take notice and think poorly of them. On the other hand, I thought, this might be nothing more than a ploy to shape our opinions of him before we’d properly had time to pass judgment.

“Back in Washington,” he said, giving his brittle, snaplike smile, “there’s a lot of … concern … about what’s happening to Dr. King.” Groat lifted a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, lit one, blew smoke toward the ceiling, then flicked the ash into his soda can. “His friends, some of his closest aides, are damned worried. Did you two know that?”

“No,” I said. “Worried about what?”

“Despair, fits of depression.” Groat spread open one of his portfolios, then read from his pages like a doctor delivering a diagnosis, his face knotted around the eyes. “According to reports I’ve got here, he’s got everyone worried. Most of the time he’s morose, distracted. Can’t sleep at night, so he stays up making his staff listen to his sermons over and over again. I figure he’s worn out Andrew Young by now, and earlier this month when he took a vacation — about the first he’s had in years — he damned near scared Ralph Abernathy to death after he got out of bed in his pajamas and started singing “Rock of Ages” on his hotel balcony. More people on Atlanta’s SCLC staff than I care to mention can’t see the logic behind his plan to flood Washington with the poor; he’s known to walk out of those meetings when things don’t go his way. See, I think it’s the strain. All the riots and death in the cities last year. And the years before that. He blames himself for them. And if he doesn’t, if he denies that there’s blood on his hands, his critics lay the corpses right on his doorstep, telling him the day of nonviolence is done, that it was just a foolish dream anyway. Then you got to figure how he’s feeling, what with Adam Clayton Powell calling him Martin Loser King, H. Rap Brown taking over SNCC, donations to the SCLC dropping, and one of his own folks, James Bevel, saying whites are the most savage, bestial, murderous, and corrupt people on earth ’cause at bottom they’re mentally ill. Look at all he’s got stacked against him. Every civil rights leader — Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Jackie Robinson, Ralph Bunche, and even King’s own father at first — says his stand against Vietnam is the most reckless thing he’s ever done, a move that’ll splinter the Movement right down the middle, seeing how the military’s been at the forefront of integration, and Johnson’s committed himself to the Great Society’s war on poverty. His former allies feel betrayed. His enemies constantly tell him he’s failed. That’s right, he hasn’t had a civil rights victory in two years. And it’s showing. Hairline cracks here and there, ones he can’t hide. He told Jesse Jackson he ought to go on one of those Gandhi-like fasts unto death to make the rioters in the cities stop and the bickering factions among black activists come together. You watch him out in public, you’ll see how his eyes keep moving, looking for someone about to attack him. That’s called paranoia, isn’t it? When he’s talking, he balls his right fist and keeps rubbing his fingers with his thumb. His speeches sound morbid. They’re all about dying. Hell, you listen close enough, they sound like they’re about a death wish. Not long ago he sent his wife a bouquet of plastic flowers. Red carnations. And when she asked him why, he told her, ‘I wanted to give you something you could always keep.’ Does that sound like a man who has given up or what? Just between you and me, one of his friends has been urging him to see a psychiatrist …”

Withersby rubbed his nose, looking up from his notepad. “He shot that idea down. I think he’s suspicious of psychoanalysis.”

“Comes from his college days,” Groat agreed. “He’s probably worried some shrink’ll go right to those two times he tried to commit suicide when he was a kid.”

“Yes, but look at Malcolm Little. He was better on that score.” Withersby glanced from Groat to me, then to Smith. “During the last year of his life, before those Muslims shot him onstage at the Audubon Ballroom, he was looking into analysis to understand how for seven years he could have preached that doctrine of Yacub, the black scientist, being the inventor of the white race. He told photographer Gordon Parks he’d been mad and sick earlier. Actually, what he said — I’ve got the report right here — was, ‘I was a zombie — like all the rest of them. I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march.‘”

Groat rocked his head. “I read that report. It’s sad it took so long for him to come to his senses. But, you know, I think Little made a lot of sense. I’m all for integration, but you ought to see some of the slime me’n Vincent spend our time investigating, scumbags like Carlo Gambino, the Gallo brothers, and Joe Columbo. I mean, do colored folks really want to integrate with them?”

“Why,” Smith asked, “are you telling us this?”

“Because we think you can help King before it’s too late. As you can tell, he won’t — or can’t — slow down. Not even for a day. You know, it’s funny how some men try to kill themselves. Not all of them take pills or stick a shotgun in their mouths. Some I’ve seen force policemen to do it for them. Others, the workaholics, do it slow. They do it by taking on tasks they know they can’t finish, projects they know will put them six feet under. I think that’s what we’ve got here. Damn near every hand is turned against this man. And what does he do? Plan night and day to bring all the poor together in April to disrupt and shut down the federal government, despite his pal Rustin telling him there’s no way he’s gonna get Irishmen, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Chicanos, and Negroes to put aside their differences and form an alliance. He brought some of their leaders together a few weeks ago, and what they said was, ‘Our problems are different from yours.’ A sane man might have second thoughts, he might wonder if he’s over-reaching himself, especially since his antiwar work’s depleted most of his funds. He’d probably wonder, I’m saying, if this last, greatest dream of his — this jump from race to class, from local crises to a national one — might turn into a nightmare when he brings all those poor people to Washington to demonstrate and fill up the hospitals and jails. He’d ask himself, What if there’s violence? How do we feed them? Where will they sleep? Or go to the toilet? Now me, I believe in what he used to stand for. I’m a Democrat, I voted for Kennedy. King’s done some good work, but there’s a problem. It’s the company he keeps. Ex-Communists and fellow travelers. In Washington they figure if he’s not red, he’s awfully doggone pink. Maybe a security risk. And dammit, I think they’re right. He’s calling for an Economic Bill of Rights, the redistribution of wealth, and a guaranteed income. Listen to this note King made to himself in fifty-one. ‘It is a well-known fact that no social institution can survive when it has outlived its usefulness. This capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.’ Now, that sure as hell sounds to me like what I hear coming from behind the Iron Curtain. What do you think?”

Smith and I did not say.

“Thing is, me’n Vincent can’t figure how he can be so red when Daddy King is a capitalist. And what about that fellah A. G. Gaston, the black insurance man who paid five thousand to bail King out of jail in Birmingham? Gaston’s worth ten mil. He says the Wall Street Journal is his Bible, and he published a book called Green Power, arguing that money was the key to solving the race problem. You’d think the Reverend woulda noticed how even he depended on creative free enterprise, right?”

“What in God’s name”—Smith squinted at Groat—“do you people want?”

“A li’l cooperation,” said Groat. “For Dr. King’s sake. Anybody can see he’s over the edge. The seeds were in his personality from the beginning. A domineering father. Guilt feelings from his privileged status as a famous preacher’s son. The sense that he had a racial mission — a destiny — to fulfill, that he was personally responsible for eliminating the world’s suffering. Messiah complex. Maybe his being so short figures in too. And there’s hypersensitivity to how others saw him, like at Crozer when he overdressed and wouldn’t go to class unless his clothes were immaculately pressed, his shoes perfectly shined, and he was, he says, morbidly conscious of being a minute late because he felt any lapse in perfection confirmed negative Negro stereotypes. He never fails to check the polls ranking colored leaders to make sure he’s there, preferably in first place. We’re talking about an Alpha male determined to leave his mark on the world, even if it’s a burn mark from scorching a city. Somebody who’d sacrifice children, for God’s sake, on the front lines of a demonstration in order to impose his will on a community. This country deserves a better — a more balanced — black leader than that. Somebody responsible, like Roy Wilkins or that attorney Samuel R. Pierce Jr. Did you see the Time article on King when they selected him as Man of the Year? If you haven’t, you might want to read that. They point out how Wilkins is sharper than King, he’s a better organizer at the NAACP, and that’s one of the minister’s worst problems — organization — which is why he has to keep an old homosexual red like Rustin around. James Farmer at CORE, they said, is more militant, SNCC’s leader John Lewis has King beat for militancy, Whitney Young Jr.’s got it all over him for sophistication, and he’ll never write a line that’d stand beside James Baldwin’s prose. Right about now, I’d say, he’s more of a liability to the civil rights movement than an asset. Truth is, I figure he’s even dangerous to himself. Now, that wasn’t always so. Once upon a time he was a damned good leader. Do you remember that talk he gave on some things colored people should do, oh, back in fifty-eight, I believe. I’ve got a copy of it right here.”

“We don’t need to see that,” Smith said.

And we didn’t.

I remembered it only too well. Few people talked these days about that speech delivered at the Holt Street Baptist Church for the MIA’s Institute on Non-Violence. It had brought the young King great criticism from the black world. He’d said the unspeakable; he’d aired “dirty laundry” and risked, some said, giving ammunition — aid and comfort — to the Movement’s enemies. His intent, of course, had been otherwise. It had been to chase down truth, as he’d always tried to do. The things he assailed that night were, in his view, the products of racism, but that did not mean they could be excused or ignored. Preparing for his trip to India, he asked the gathering at the Holt Street Baptist Church to consider — just consider — the arguments of their worst foes, as Gandhi did those of his adversaries, and if their charges contained any truth, then he urged black people to make sure the race was “ready for integration.” Their enemies in the South said all that Negroes wanted was to marry white women. He dismissed that lunacy with a wave of his hand but then added, “They say that we smell. Well, the fact is some of us do smell. I know most Negroes do not have money to fly to Paris and buy enticing perfumes, but no one is so poor that he can’t buy a five-cent bar of soap.” Then he let go, allowing his blistering sermon to take him where it would, to the things internal to the race that hurt and infuriated him. “We kill each other and cut each other too much!” Our crime and illegitimacy rates, he said, are disproportionately high compared with those of whites. No one, King roared that night, needed to speak good English in order to be good; however, that didn’t excuse schoolteachers who crippled their students with bad grammar. He moved on that evening from target to target, aiming at alcoholism (“The money Negroes spend on liquor in Alabama in one year is enough to endow three or four colleges”); at the conspicuous consumption some blacks saw as “style” (“There are too many Negroes with $2,000 incomes riding around in $5,000 cars”); and even at black physicians more concerned with status symbols than with deepening their knowledge (“Too many Negro doctors have not opened a book since leaving medical school”). Sometimes, he implied, we need to think less about what we should do and more about what we should be. Changing this litany of inherently moral problems, which could not be ignored — and might worsen over time and even threaten the Movement’s progress — was, King said, something within black America’s power then, irrespective of what the federal government did or did not do.

His 1958 sermon had been worthy of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, or Elijah Muhammad (at his best). Sadly, it brought less praise than scathing condemnation from many black people who called him an Uncle Tom. Understandably, the minister gave fewer and fewer of those speeches after the 1950s, though it was this side of King, I realized, that interested these Wise Guys most.

But Wilkins as a potential replacement? That made sense, I supposed. The executive director of the NAACP deeply envied King, often called him a liar, and met with the Bureau’s Cartha DeLoach to discuss their mutual dissatisfaction with King; Wilkins worried that the minister’s escalating conflicts with Hoover, and King damning the FBI for not protecting civil rights workers, would severely impair the Movement’s progress. In fact, Wilkins along with a few other Negro leaders led the effort three years earlier to get King to accept the presidency of a small college or the position of pastor at a large black church in order to retire him as the foremost Negro leader. No, there was no love lost between Wilkins and King, who’d refused the executive director’s offer by saying he knew only too well “the hypocrisy of adulation.”

“What,” I asked, “do you want with us?”

“Like I said, a li’l cooperation. But you don’t have to do a thing, Matthew. You can rest.” He fanned himself with one of his folders. “We know how well you and the Griffith girl brought along Chaym. Know a li’l about his history too. His kin’s from down here originally. On his mother’s side, we can trace his family tree back to a free woman named Baleka Calhoun. She came over in a slave ship before Surrender. Belonged to an African tribe called the Allmuseri. They’re all dead now, of course, or moved on. He’s pretty much the last of his line. Now, what I been thinking is if Zorro—”

“Who?” I said.

A quick, elastic little grin quivered round Groat’s mouth. “Excuse me, I meant to say if Dr. King was to one day lose his standing as a leader, he’d have to retire, now wouldn’t he? And it’d probably be the best thing for him, and for the country — if we saved him from himself, I mean.”

I asked, “How could that happen?”

“It’s something we’d like to discuss with Chaym … alone, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I think you’d better leave now,” said Smith. “I’m not interested in anything you have to say.”

Groat chuckled and gave Withersby a sideways glance. “We’ll leave, if that’s what you want. But I just want to say that it’d be a shame if somebody decided to reopen the investigation into who killed Juanita Lomax and her kids.”

Withersby added, “Don’t forget that apartment fire on Indiana Avenue.”

“Oh, that’s right! Whoever did that would be facing, oh, what would you say, Vincent?”

“Twenty years, easy.”

Groat gave a headshake and scratched his chin. “Mmhmm. I’d say that.”

Smith looked as if his mind had stopped. The line of his lips thickened. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Listen, I was just starting to put my life back together. Right here, in this place—”

“That’s good to hear,” said Groat. “It’s something you could come back to, and with a whole lot more money to help you make it better. Do you think we could take a ride and talk a little more?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

“Chaym,” I said, “you can’t go with them—”

“Matthew.” Withersby looked square at me. “This doesn’t concern you anymore. The best thing for you to do is go back to Chicago. Maybe get back in school. Or maybe you’d like to think about becoming an agent. I believe you’d be a good one. I could help you with your application, if you like.”

“No, thank you.”

Smith looked at me as a man might if a noose was tied round his neck. “It’s all right, we’re just gonna talk.” Then he laughed, brokenly. “It’s just a li’l karma catching up with me, I guess. Check your Deuteronomy 32:35.”

I followed them to the front door, coming close up behind the Wise Guys just in time to hear Smith asking a question that had bothered me from the beginning. “How long have you been watching us?”

“Since the day you arrived at King’s apartment,” Withersby said. “You know, it’s a shame someone as talented as you has always been in the shadows. But that happens to geniuses, doesn’t it?”

“You think that’s what I am?”

“I know it, Chaym. And we want to help you …”

After they left, squeezing Smith between them on the front seat of their green Plymouth, pulling away at twilight, I sat on the front porch for hours, drinking a six-pack of Budweiser, waiting for them to return. In the distance, darkness began to stain the horizon, the hills, all the farmhouses, and the blue silhouettes of trees were black against the sky. Then it was night, and the world shrank. Was smaller, it seemed to me. Each time I saw a pair of headlights appear on the narrow, root-covered road, I stepped drunkenly into the yard, straining my eyes, only to see those lights pass the farmhouse by. I returned to the porch, starting on a second six-pack. And waited. The more I drank, the more the palpable dread I felt mercifully dulled, but I was unable to shake off Withersby’s words and wanted to shoot him. There was something awful in the way he’d said it, We want to help you, as if he knew well the demons of desire and inadequacy that dwelled within Smith, all those decades of never being appreciated, and was playing him, but for what?

What possible use could these Wise Guys have for the minister’s double? I tore the tab off another beer, drained half its contents, and belched, remembering that leaders like Hitler and Stalin employed stand-ins, and it was rumored that Fidel Castro had a couple of look-alike actors always waiting in the wings to impersonate him. So we had envisioned Smith’s role from the start. But what happened to doubles when the original became expendable, or a liability? I wondered: What if the Wise Guys really had no use for him? No more than they did for King. What if their assignment was to eliminate or discredit the minister — wouldn’t they want to eliminate as well the one capable of standing in during his absence?

By midnight they still had not returned. My stomach felt sour. My thoughts kept twisting, torquing so I could not stay any longer on the porch, listening to the wind whirling leaves and whistling in the treetops. I went inside the empty farmhouse, which seemed desolate and ghostlike, now that Amy was gone for good and, I feared, Smith was gone too. My aimless pacing took me through the front room where he’d devoted himself to studying minutiae of the minister’s life, to the spot in the kitchen where I’d kissed Amy, and finally to the closed door of Smith’s bedroom. I turned the knob, cracking open the door. I stepped inside, clicked on the ceiling light, and sat heavily down on his bed. There in one corner was his dented saxophone. I picked it up, plopped down again on the bed, wet the mouthpiece, and tried to play, producing not the mellow sound he’d conjured from his instrument but instead a blaat! that more resembled breaking wind than melody. No, I would never be a musician.

I returned the horn to its place in the corner, and as I turned around I saw something sticking out from under his bed, barely concealed by the blanket. I got down on one knee, peered under the mattress, and found a cardboard box filled with sketches, some in watercolor, others in charcoal. I spread them on the bed. It had been months since I’d seen his drawings, months in which his heart had subtly begun to change. His earlier pieces, I recalled, had seemed anguished and grotesque, some indebted to George Grosz’s savage depictions of the German bourgeoisie during World War II, except that earlier Smith’s targets were Negroes and American whites who betrayed the dream of the beloved community — race merchants who capitalized on their people’s suffering for personal profit, black thieves who preyed upon the poor unable to escape them in an era of apartheid, and Caucasians so guilt-ridden by the sins of their forebears they lost all reason when blackmailing, professional Race Men accused them of every social crime imaginable; all these players fell beneath Smith’s brutal pen and brushwork, the opportunists, race pimps and profiteers, and bigots whom he always drew dragging their knuckles on the ground like Neanderthals. But these new pages he’d filled, showing them to no one, shoving them under his bed in a cardboard box, were astonishingly different. In some way he’d descended into hell in his earlier work, during his days of exile, facing without flinching the ugliest, most paralyzing features of color and caste and inequality, squeezing them for every drop of pus and corruption they contained. And then, sometime after taking the bullet intended for King (so the dates on his drawings suggested), he’d let that go, released it. His new sketches were simplicity itself: delicate, lovingly detailed studies of the landscape around the farmhouse in different gradations of light. There were at least two dozen wordless meditations on a single ramose tree in the front yard, as if that one object — seen clearly and through no eyes but his own — might reveal the world’s mystery and wonder. He reveled in the play of colors, knowing they did not exist — colors, secondary qualities — outside the miracle of consciousness, which made every one of us (so his notebooks claimed) the magister ludi, the maestro of each moment of perception. I found drawings of Amy so real, so naturalistically rendered, it seemed she had appeared instantaneously, transported from Chicago to Carbondale like the spacemen in a TV series. There were several portraits of me, though I barely recognized myself. Me as he envisioned I might be in a decade, no longer the insecure, callow prop in the background of someone else’s story (or the chronicles of a mass movement) but instead an individual inexhaustible and ineffable in his haecceitas and open-ended promise. I stared and stared at these portraits. I went through all his sketches, studying each carefully, and I came to see that in them Smith had decided that if the world our absent fathers made was hideous, unfair, and unacceptable, a realm where we were condemned, then all right: he would reinvent it from scratch, if need be, in his art and actions.

His notebooks were no less revealing, the yellowed pages bearing his minute transcriptions of verse by Shinkichi Takahasi:

The wind blows hard among the pines

Toward the beginning

Of an endless past.

Listen: you’ve heard everything.

And from Shinsho:

Does one really have to fret

About Enlightenment?

No matter what road I travel,

I’m going home.

It was dawn before I finished reviewing his sketches and notebooks, and still the green Plymouth had not returned. Exhausted, I fell asleep on his bed, surrounded by drawings, and didn’t wake until late afternoon. I stumbled to the front porch: nothing. No one. And then I began to suspect they had killed him. All day long I watched the road, emptied every bottle and beer can in the kitchen, and turned to the spiral-bound college notebook in which I kept a record of our covert project for the Revolution, catching up on my entries, trying to describe everything I remembered since the Wise Guys intervened with as much accuracy as I could muster, though even as I wrote and drank I heard Smith’s caveat that words always disguised as much as they delivered, covered up as much as they clarified, and by twilight I doubted every event and experience I’d squeezed into that ontological unit, the Procrustean bed of the English sentence. Come evening, I could stay at the Nest no longer. I climbed in the Chevelle and rode aimlessly for half an hour on the hills and backroads of Little Egypt, driving with my elbow out of the window, fingers curled on the roof. I stopped at a filling station, bought a newspaper, and read of a disaster in Memphis during a demonstration for striking sanitation workers. Sixty people injured. A sixteen-year-old black boy shot in the back. One hundred fifty-five stores damaged. I tossed the paper on the backseat, climbed behind the wheel, and drove for another hour until I realized my directionless wandering had brought me to Rev. Littlewood’s church.

It was beginning to rain. The air was cool, turning to chill. A few fireflies drifted by. From the outside, Bethel was quiet as a tomb. There were no services on weekday evenings. I let myself in, soaking wet, switched on the lights, and immediately the sedate ambience of the church crept into me. Naturally, I first noticed our labor — our lives distilled, a kind of prayer itself — in the repairs to the entryway, pews, balustrades, and pulpit. All of it anonymous, of course. Unsigned. Nevertheless, I knew a twinge of satisfaction as I walked to the front row of benches, my footsteps echoing loudly; then I sat down and dripped. Wind battered the high stained-glass windows. Rain drummed on the roof. I looked at the new doors we’d installed on either side of the stage, and then my eyes came to rest on the two portraits of Jesus behind the podium. In one an angel comforted him in the Garden of Gethsemane; in the other, Simon the Cyrene, an African, carried to Golgotha the heavy wooden cross to which the bone-weary Nazarene would be nailed by his enemies. In the stillness of Bethel’s sanctuary, I found myself falling toward that image, wondering how Simon, a man from the country, felt when the Roman soldiers conscripted him to shoulder the rood: a black man from the most despised tribe on earth given the priceless gift of easing the suffering of a savior. In that scene, he was an extra. On stage for but a sentence in Matthew 27:32. He was given no speech. In Hollywood, he would have been paid the union minimum. Most likely he wouldn’t be found in the credits. And after one magnificent moment of serendipity and contingency, of accident and chance (not unlike the young King’s being in Montgomery at the right moment to merge with history), Simon blended anonymously — invisibly — back into the wailing crowd. Outside history. I felt I knew him. Was him. No man could equal the Nazarene. But Simon? I was thinking that here was a black man I might measure myself against, a standard I could attain, when behind me I heard a soft-breathing voice, one as firm and deep as an old country well.

“Matthew—”

Startled, I swung my head round and saw the minister sitting behind me. My jaw fell halfway. My breath went out of me. “Sir, I didn’t know you were—”

“Uh-uh, it’s me, buddy.”

“Chaym?”

I knuckled my eyes. I looked again. It was Smith, shaven, with his hair cropped short, wearing a blue suit and tie. There was a rain-dampened trenchcoat spread over his knees. He looked more like King than at any time before. “Where have you been?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Can I help?”

“I doubt it. Naw, I can’t be saved …”

“What did they do to you?”

“Just talk. They got me a new place to stay and my wallet’s fat.”

“You took it?”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” He let his shoulders relax and reached into a pocket of his suitcoat. “Maybe you don’t understand. They’ve got me over a barrel. And I’m scared. I ain’t ashamed to say that. The things they’re talking about … what they want me to do to embarrass him … the shit they’re up to in Memphis … I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I don’t want to go to prison. I’d die before I’d let anybody lock me up again, but I don’t know if I want to live if I do what they’re asking.” He closed his eyes, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. “They’re outside in the car. They let me go to the farmhouse to pick up some of my things. When I didn’t see you there, I figured maybe you’d be here. I told them I left some of my stuff at Bethel …” He withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his coat and handed it to me. “I found one of these. Thought I’d give it to you, just to tidy things up a bit.”

I opened the paper. It was the Commitment Blank. The decalogue of the Movement. Which he’d signed.

“Give that to the sister for me, all right?”

“Chaym—”

“It’s over, Bishop.”

“Wait.” I tried to lighten things a little. “I thought you wanted to help with my salvation.”

He raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Sorry. You’re on your own. But there is one thing you can do for me.”

Had it not been for the wink he gave me, I would have thought I was listening and talking to King, How could I refuse him anything? “What?”

“Pray for me. I can’t do that for myself.”

“Of course. I will, but—”

“Do it now.”

He waited, fixing me so fiercely with his eyes I turned in my seat, bringing my hands together, the wrinkled Movement decalogue between my fingers. But as before, no words came to me. My faith was frail. Payers had always failed me. Like millions of black men, I was a bastard who’d never known his father — the word used for people like me was “illegitimate.” Whoever my father was, he’d rejected me long ago. How could I pray to a Father? I squeezed my eyes tighter, thinking of Chaym’s troubles, and those of the minister. Slowly I petitioned whatever powers that be, regardless of what they thought of me, to keep them from harm, praying not for myself as I’d always done, but instead or those I loved, and as the sense of their fragility and my own filled me, our lives of a few hours in a world of two minutes, the evil that waited outside our door, I felt something slam inside my chest, then hot tears were hopping down my cheeks, and instead of offering words I wept for my counterfeit, fatherless status, gave myself over to it shamelessly, and by the end of my halting, stumbling appeal I felt emptied, no longer trying to bring a distant God’s grace to my finite desires as His cast-aside son, but only wishing Thy will be done.

I took out my handkerchief, cleaned my spectacles, and blew my nose. I turned in my seat. Smith was gone. The benches behind me, row after row, were unpeopled, and the front door of Bethel AME creaked open onto the unsearchable darkness, as if a djinn had passed into our lives and just as miraculously disappeared.