Dreamer

13

On the evening of April 4 (Thursday) one hundred and twenty-five American cities began erupting in flame: a prophet had fallen. Pronounced dead at 7:05 P.M. The electrifying, awful report that a metal-jacketed 30.-06 bullet brought down the man who was the nation’s moral conscience, ripping away the right side of his jaw and neck, severing his spine on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, spread through this splintered world like a declaration of war. There came a confusion of tongues in a house divided against itself. “Nonviolence is a dead philosophy,” proclaimed Floyd McKissick, “and it was not the black people that killed it. It was the white people that killed nonviolence, and the white racists at that.” So many agreed with McKissick. “Get your gun,” shouted Stokely Carmichael. “When white America killed Dr. King, she declared war on us!” The rioting and looting that Citizen King had loathed lasted for ten days in a blood-drenched decade that left everyone perpetually short of breath. In Texas, white students cheered when they heard he was dead. (I am not ashamed to say I hated them.) In Washington, D.C., seven hundred blazes blackened the sky. Tendrils of smoke drifted through windows in the White House, where Lyndon Johnson designated Sunday, April 7, a day of national mourning. Flags were lowered to half-staff. Schools closed. The baseball season was postponed. Three networks broadcast his funeral for six hours. Docks were shut down. Pope Paul VI cried out that this “cowardly and atrocious” killing of our better brother “weighed on the conscience of mankind.” It was four and a half years since JFK’s murder. Four years since Malcolm X’s. Robert Kennedy (only two months away from the bullet that would end his life in Los Angeles) had three extra telephones installed in Coretta’s home and chartered an Electra jet to bring the body of Atlanta’s finest son — now dwelling in a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens — home to lie in state in the Sisters’ Chapel of Spelman College. We had never, I knew, been equal to him, or to the transcendent tasks he called us to perform. He was destined for vaticide. Before this ritualistic blood ceremony, this foundation sacrifice, ended, forty-six people were dead. Whites, pulled from their cars, were beaten mercilessly and stabbed. Two thousand six hundred people were injured. Another twenty-one thousand were arrested, myself and Amy among them at an April 5 demonstration in Chicago, where I’d returned to school.

By Tuesday of that longest week in modern history, I stood in sweltering heat outside Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, travel-worn and with a bad case of trench mouth. The corners of my eyes were crusted after the long drive from Illinois. My hair was uncombed and dry, the scent in my clothes was the aroma of sweat commingled with fried chicken eaten on the road. My mind felt like a freshly opened grave. I was one of sixty thousand people encircling the building where King was baptized and raised, listening, on a sun-heavy street beneath a cerulean sky, to Dr. L. Harold DeWolf and Rev. Ralph Abernathy on a loudspeaker because we — Amy, Mama Pearl, and myself — were unable to get inside, where nearly eight hundred mourners filled the pews. These, of course, were the dignitaries: Carmichael, who came with his bodyguards, entertainers like Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dick Gregory, all of whom had marched arm-in-arm with King. (Marion Brando pledged ten percent of his earnings to the Cause.) The politicians were there too, particularly the ones running for president that fall (Eugene McCarthy and Richard Nixon, but Hubert Humphrey came instead of LBJ), and we saw the nations other grand woman of sorrows, Jacqueline Kennedy, enter the crowded church as well. On and on they came to pay their last respects in public, the hypocrites and true bearers of homage to the colored man who died for our collective racial sins and spiritual failures. I felt no need to be inside with them, but as I listened to Abernathy’s eloquent speech, my head felt light. My knees buckled a little. Amy, perspiring on her upper lip, put her arm around my waist to steady me. “Are you going to be okay?” I didn’t know the answer to that, or to a thousand other questions that had troubled my sleep since King fell in the crosshairs of that high-powered rifle.

But this much I did know:

The day before he died, the sky above Memphis was turgid, the spring air moistened and charged by electricity from a thunderstorm the night before. As I said, I was back in school, studying Brightman, as he’d asked me to do, but I called his hotel on the evening of the third. The whole city knew where he was staying because his room number had been broadcast on several radio stations. He’d picked the Lorraine Motel to stay at after an article appeared in a Memphis paper criticizing him for running away to the Rivermont after the earlier aborted march down Beale Street (it was Bureau copy, of that I was convinced). When he returned to Memphis, detectives assigned to protect him met King at the airport but left after someone in his entourage shouted, “We don’t want you here.” Local organizers hurried him off to the Lorraine, lodgings that one of his aides, Hosea Williams, found confusing, since they had never stayed there before. He was originally given a room (306) on the ground floor, then reassigned to the second floor (305), and Abernathy was put in the first room. I reached him at about 4 P.M. Tired, he said all he wanted to do that evening was rest before spending most of the next day with organizers for the march. He’d toyed with the idea of finding someone to substitute for him at a rally he was slated to attend at the Mason Temple, and in the end decided to let Abernathy do it for him.

But when Abernathy reached the Mason Temple he found the crowd clamoring for King. That night they would accept no stand-ins. Wearily, the minister changed out of his pajamas and was driven to the temple in pounding rain with Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson (wearing bluejeans and a brown jacket). Without a text, he thundered oratory that made the audience forget the storm lashing the temple’s windows. “I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land,” he said. “I’m so happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality … With this faith we will be able to achieve this new day, when all God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing with the Negroes in the spiritual of old. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last!’” And when he was done, and turned away from the bank of gleaming microphones, it seemed he fell, exhausted, toward Abernathy, who rushed with outthrown arms to embrace and steady him on his feet.

He and his staff decided to postpone the march for the sanitation workers until Monday. His plan that Wednesday was to visit Rev. Samuel Kyles’s home for dinner on Thursday evening. Somewhere I’d heard that on the third he’d dined on catfish, buttered black-eyed peas, and a tossed salad at the Four Way Grill. He asked me, “How is Chaym? The last time we talked, you said you hadn’t seen him, that two men came by the farmhouse …”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right. It’s been weeks.”

“Do you think those government men killed him?”

“Honestly, I don’t know, sir.” And I did not. All that was left of Chaym Smith were a few of his deeds and products: paintings, sketchbooks, and his saxophone, which I was learning to play by paying for private lessons with a graduate student in Columbia College’s Music Department. Sometimes I sat doing meditation “with seed,” as it was called, journeying through passages I’d committed to memory from the spiritual traditions of the world. Occasionally I volunteered at the poorer churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques, though I belonged to none. Now and then when I thought of it, I practiced the Tai Chi Chuan form he’d taught me. And I no longer worried about defining myself or being wrong. “I just pray he’s all right.”

“So do I. We’ve had too many casualties already. If it’s not Division Five after us, then it’s COINTEL-PRO or COMINFIL. Since sixty-three we’ve had more break-ins than I can remember, and they’ve planted informants everywhere and … Wait, I think someone’s calling me — I’d better go.”

“Good night,” I said, “and God bless you.”

“Good-bye, Matthew.”

It was the last time we’d spoken. (Why, when he said that, did he sound so like Socrates bidding farewell to Crito?) Later, when I pored over the flood of news reports, trying to make sense of his slaying, my hands shaking, I found only conundrums, as if I was prying open a Chinese puzzle box. The deeper I descended, the funnier-looking these fish appeared. The man in charge of the police and fire departments, I discovered, was Frank Holloman, who’d been with the Bureau for twenty-five years. He and Hoover were friends. In fact, Holloman once ran the Atlanta office of the FBI, which kept the Kings under surveillance. In other words, the Bureau had Memphis locked up tight. Yet King had no security — his own people had run them off because they didn’t trust the police. The city had assigned two detectives, one of them a black man named Ed Reddick, to be in Fire Station 2, just south of the Lorraine Motel. It was a good location for keeping an eye on the motel, but on that Wednesday two black firemen — Norvell Wallace and Floyd Newsom — were pulled off the job. People said different things about that, and none of them made sense to me. Someone told the firemen there was a threat made against them (some said this was Reddick), so they were transferred, allegedly for their own safety. (Reddick said he did not have them transferred.) But then, Reddick was pulled away too; a Secret Service man from D.C. met him at the station and said there was a contract out on his life, so they sent him home. Yet — and yet — some Negroes called Detective Reddick a spy who felt that one of the black firemen was a militant sympathetic to the strikers. This welter of conflicting “facts,” of so many testimonies that contradicted one another, was dizzying, and I swear I didn’t have a cross-eyed guess as to who was telling the truth.

And the facts grew stranger with each new string I pulled. James Earl Ray, a drifter and escaped convict sentenced in 1960 to twenty years in the Missouri State Penitentiary for armed robbery (aliases: Eric Gait, Harvey Lomeyer, John Willard) with a white Mustang bearing Alabama license plate 1-38993, but no motivation for murdering King, was being hunted as the prime suspect for the shooting. But, I wondered, as any sane man would, if a real assassin might leave behind so many fingerprinted items (shaving cream, clippers, a radio with Ray’s prison I.D.) to clearly identify him on the street outside Bessie Brewers boardinghouse at 4221/2 South Main Street? No, that was more than I could accept. In his FBI wanted poster, in his history, Ray perfectly fit the image of a patsy. Or a fool.

The gun, a 760 Remington Gamemaster, was never swabbed to determine if it had been fired. And the copperjacketed bullet sent to the FBI didn’t match — or so I read — the one extracted from King. That bullet entered his lower jaw and cheek one and a half inches below his mouth, hit the jawbone, reentered above the collarbone, then went down (left) through his neck. It was visible as a node in his left shoulder under the skin. Had he lived, he would have been a vegetable. (And who among us could have beared seeing him that way?) According to the physician who removed the bullet in St. Joseph’s Hospital, it was intact, its end flattened out. A whole bullet weighed 150 grams. The one dug out of King was 4.7 grams and 3.0 inches round. But that was not the same bullet that found its way with other evidence to Washington, D.C.

Complicating things further, and giving me more sleepless nights than I cared to count, were the claims of two black witnesses at the Lorraine when King went down, one foot stuck in the railing of the balcony, his shoe off, a cigarette crushed in his hand; they claimed they saw a plume of white smoke rise up from the large, hedgelike bushes at the back of the boardinghouse. One was Solomon Jones, Kings driver in the limousine, borrowed from a funeral parlor, which was to take King, musician Ben Branch, and Jackson to Rev. Kyles’s home. Jones said he saw a man in those bushes. So did Earl Caldwell, a journalist sent to Memphis (his editor at the New York Times, he said, wanted him to “nail” King) who heard the shot, followed by someone yelling, “Get low!” People were ducking everywhere in the courtyard, but Caldwell saw a crouching white figure in the bushes, wearing overalls and looking up at the balcony. All those bushes were cut down on April 5 by the police, who said — and I winced at their words — they needed to clear the area to look for evidence.

Inside Ebenezer Church, a choir began singing the minister’s favorite hymns, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “In Christ There Is No East Nor West.” Time stood still. The crowd was quiet, intense. A knot gathered in my throat. (I was thinking how, according to Andrew Young, when King fell on that balcony, Jesse Jackson covered his palms with the minister’s blood, wiped them on his sweater; then the next day he flew to Chicago to appear bloodstained before the press, declaring he’d held a dying King in his arms. That was untrue, said Young, and I was haunted by the feeling that this act of theater and falsity, this photo-op, would define the spirit of the black struggle for decades after the minister’s demise. Had he not said to Carmichael, “I’ve been used before”?) Then my heart gave a slight jump when Abernathy played a recording of King’s sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct,” which the minister had delivered at Ebenezer earlier in the year, on February 4, taking his text from Mark 10:35, where James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approach Jesus with their desire to sit beside him in Glory. King’s bronze voice, that startling basso profundo, washed over the crowd in skin-prickling waves and reverberated in the ether.

“There is, deep down within all of us, an instinct. It’s a kind of drum major instinct — a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs a whole gamut of life … We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant impulse … this desire for attention … Now in adult life, we still have it, and we really never get by it. We like to do something good. And you know, we liked to be praised for it … But there comes a time when the drum major instinct can become destructive. And that’s where I want to move now … Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior. Nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. I must be first. I must be supreme. Our nation must rule the world … but let me rush on to my conclusion, because I want you to see what Jesus was really saying … Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That’s what I want you to do …”

Pallbearers brought out King’s bier, loading it onto a flatbed farm wagon pulled by two mules — a striking, martyrial phaeton symbolic of the Poor People’s Campaign that consumed King’s last days. The funeral bells tanged and the wagon began its long trek halfway across Atlanta to Morehouse College, where Rev. Benjamin Mays would give the eulogy. A slow march. A sorrowful march with the mules chacking beneath a sun that burned mercilessly overhead. We fell in behind fifty thousand mourners following the procession. I heard the clop-clop of the mules’ heels on hot concrete. Along the way, spectators crowded the sidewalks, a herd of multicolored humanity guilty of sloth, pride, anger, gluttony, covetousness, envy, lust, and acedia. Some dropped to their knees to pray. In spite of myself, my face broke. Amy took my hand, intertwining her fingers with mine, and I took her grandmama’s. Dressed in black, Mama Pearl had to be hot, there on a spring day in Atlanta, with the crush of bodies that closed us in. Her skin was sweat-streaked. She was weeping as we walked, her mouth quivering. I gave her my handkerchief.

“He was a beautiful man. I know he’s got his jeweled ring and purple robe. And he liked my rugala.” She dabbed at her eyes and handed back my handkerchief, rumpled and moist, and thanked me for it.

“Sama-sama.”

“How’s that again, Matthew?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking—”

“About who killed Dr. King?” asked Amy.

“No,” I said. “I know that.”

“Who?”

“We all did.”

Amy shot me a look, all irritation, as the throng labored with a cautious tread, one that said she couldn’t see herself as responsible. But I saw. I understood. We’d killed him — all of us, black and white — because we didn’t listen when he was alive, though this was, of course, the way of things: no prophet was accepted in his own country. Even before his death, we were looking for other, more “radical” black spokesmen. The Way of agapic love, with its bottomless demands, had proven too hard for this nation. Hatred and competition were easier. Exalting the ethnic ego proved far less challenging than King’s belief in the beloved community. We loved violence — verbal and physical — too dearly. Our collective spirit, the Geist of our era, had slain him as surely as the assassin’s bullet that cut him down. We were all Cainites. And deservedly cursed. Did we not kill the best in ourselves when we killed King? Wasn’t every murder a suicide as well?

All around us, the crowd of the apostates kept pace behind the wagon, concrescing. Walking on, the air now a bright shimmer, I believed in each of us there was a wound, an emptiness that would not be filled in our lifetime. But we could not stop if we wanted to, or go backward.

Amy pressed a little nearer to me, squeezing my hand. “What do you think he’d want us to do now?”

“Excuse me, keep moving forward. If we stop, we’ll fall and be trampled.”

“Matthew?”

“Eh?”

Her eyes swung up, searching my face. “What about Chaym? Where do you think he is?”

I dropped my gaze, watching my feet and those of the sinners in front of me. I thought hard. “Everywhere …”

That seemed to satisfy her, and she smiled as the crowd of the contrite rolled on like a piece of the sea, both of us but waves blending perfectly with its flow, our fingers interlaced, and perhaps she felt, as I did, that if the prophet King had shown us the depths of living possible for those who loved unconditionally in a less than just universe engraved with inequality, and that only the servants should lead, then Chaym had in his covert passage through our lives let us know that, if one missed the Galilean mark, even the pariahs, the fatherless exiles, might sometimes — and occasionally — doeth well.

Amen.