Dreamer

1

I knocked on his open bedroom door. “Doc?”

Rolling over, he crushed the lumpy pillow against his chest but kept his eyes closed, probably hoping whoever had come would go away, at least for a few moments more. Except for one other security person, we were alone in the apartment. His wife and children were staying at the home of Mahalia Jackson until the shooting died down. Later he would tell me he’d been dreaming of the sunset at Land’s End, that breathtaking stretch of beach on Cape Comorin in the Hindu state of Kerala, which struck him as the closest thing to paradise when he and Coretta traveled to India: he dreamed an ancient village of brown-skinned people (Africa was in their ancestry) who knew their lord Vishnu by a thousand names, for He was imminent in the sky and sand, wood and stone, masquerading as Many. He’d come to India not as celebrated civil rights leader but as a pilgrim. To learn. And though the promise of that pilgrimage was cut short when he plunged into the ongoing crisis back home, he had indeed learned much. Against the glorious sunset of Kerala, with the softest whisper of song carried on the wind from temples close by, Ahimsa paramo dharma, his wife took his hand and turned him to see the moon swell up from the sea, and in that evanescent instant, at the place where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal flowed together, he experienced an ineffable peace, and had never felt so free, and …

“Doc, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said into the darkness. Though the lamps were off, burning fires outside the window pintoed his bedroom wall. “There’s someone here to see you. I think you’d better take a look at him.”

When he looked toward the door, toward me, I knew what he saw: a twenty-four-year-old with the large, penetrating “frog eyes” of his friend James Baldwin behind a pair of granny glasses, dehydrating and dripping sweat in brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt weighted down by a battery of pencils and pens. I stepped into the room and walked directly to the window, looking down before I shut it on streets turned into combat zones as treacherous as any that year in Tay Ninh or Phnom Penh. The fuse: black kids cranking on fire hydrants. The flame: police trying to stop them. The consequence: a crowd that poured bricks and whiskey bottles and then ricocheting bullets from balconies and rooftops. It was not a night, July 17, to be out in bedlam unless you had to be. Firefighters dousing blazes set by roving street gangs had to be out there. Marksmen hunkered down behind their squad cars, praying that Governor Kerner would order, as promised, four thousand National Guardsmen into the city, had to be there — and so in a few short hours did the man whose sleep I had interrupted.

At the window, I could see two men shoot out the streetlight at the intersection of Sixteenth Street and South Hamlin. Their first shots missed the target; then at last one struck, plunging the corner into darkness. A sound of shattering glass came from the grocery store on Sixteenth Street. The pistol fire had been so close, just below the window, it changed air pressure inside the building, tightening my inner ear. Roving gangs were setting cars on fire. Light from the interiors of torched cars threw shadows like strokes of tar across the bedroom’s furnishings. Below the window figures darted furtively through the darkness, their colors and clans indistinguishable, slaying — or trying to slay — one another. I no longer knew on which side of this slaying I belonged. Or if there was any victory, pleasure, or Promised Land that could justify the killing and destruction of the past three nights.

I looked at the watch on my wrist. The luminous numerals read 8:15, but it felt more like midnight in the soul.

“Who is it?” The minister rubbed his eyes. “Is he here for the Agenda Committee meeting? Tell him I’ll be ready in just a minute—”

“No, sir. He’s outside in the hallway now. Reverend, I think you need to take a look at this.”

After swinging his feet to the floor, he sat hunched forward, both elbows on his knees, waiting for his head to clear. I noticed he wore no cross around his neck. Nor did he need one. With his shirt open, there in the bedroom’s heat, I could see the scar tissue shaped like a rood — a permanent one — over his heart, carved into his flesh by physician Aubre D. Maynard when he removed Izola Curry’s letter opener from his chest in Harlem Hospital. I knew he was tired, and I did not rush him. His staff had been working off-the-clock since the West Side went ballistic. He hadn’t slept in two days. Neither had I. All this night I’d drifted in and out of nausea, finding a clear space where I briefly felt fine, then as I heard the gunfire again, sirens, the sickness returned in spasms of dizziness, leaving me weak and overheated, then chilled.

He reached toward his nightstand for the wristwatch he’d left on top of a stack of books—The Writings of Saint Paul, Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy, Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ—alongside the sermon he was preparing for the coming Sunday. Typically, his sermons took two-thirds of a day to compose. In them his conclusions were never merely closures but always seemed to be fresh starting points. The best were classically formal, intentionally Pauline, cautious at the beginning like the first hesitant steps up a steep flight of stairs, then each carefully chosen refrain pushed it higher, faster, with mounting intensity, toward a crescendo that fused antique form and African rhythms, Old Testament imagery and America’s most cherished democratic ideals — principles dating back to the Magna Carta — into a shimmering creation, a synthesis so beautiful in the way his words alchemized the air in churches and cathedrals it could convert the wolf of Gubbio. He was, I realized again, a philosopher, which was something easy to forget (even for him) in a breathless year that began with the January murder of student Sammy Younge in Alabama, seventeen-year-old Jerome Huey beaten to death in Cicero in May, Fred Hubbard shot in April, Ben Chester White (Mississippi) and Clarence Triggs (Louisiana) killed by the Klan in June and July, the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond in February because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, Kwame Nkrumah deposed as Ghana’s leader the same month, then the slaughter of eight Chicago student nurses by a madman named Richard Speck. Not until I saw the books by his bed did I recall that in a less tumultuous time he taught Greek thought to a class of Morehouse students, among them Julian Bond, who testified that King, a freshly minted Ph.D., often looked up from his notes, closed his copy of Plato’s collected dialogues, and brought whole cloth out of his head passages from Socrates’ apology, emphasizing the seventy-one-year-old sage’s reply to his executioners, “I would never submit wrongly to any authority through fear of death, but would refuse even at the cost of my life.”

After turning his watch-stem a few times, he squinted up at me, searching his mind for my name. I could tell he remembered me only as one of his organization’s many, nameless volunteers.

“I know I’ve seen you, urn—”

“Matthew, sir. Matthew Bishop.”

“Oh yes, of course,” he said.

Although he took great care to put everyone on his staff at ease, I’d always felt awkward and off-balance on the few occasions I’d been in his presence; I’d never seemed able to say the right things or find a way to stand or sit that didn’t betray how disbelieving I was that he was talking to someone who had as little consequence in this world (or the next) as I did. As he pulled on his shoes, I guessed straightaway what he was thinking: I was not making sense, nor was I much to look at. I knew I left no lasting impression on people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name. I had no outstanding features, no “best side,” as they say, to hold in profile. During SCLC meetings, a demonstration, rally, or march, I blended easily into the background, as bland and undistinguished as a piece of furniture, so anonymous most people forgot I was there. I was no taller than the minister himself, but much thinner: a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself. I kept my hair neatly trimmed, wore respectable shoes, and always had a book or magazine nearby to flip open when I found myself alone, which, as it turned out, was most of the time, even when I was in a crowd. I was nobody. A man reminded of his mediocrity — and perishability — nearly every moment of the day. A nothing. Merely a face in the undifferentiated mass of Movement people who dutifully did what our leaders asked, feeling sometimes like a cog in a vast machine — I did feel that way often: replaceable like the placards we made for a march, or the flyers we plastered all over the city, only to paper over them with new pages a week later.

Then why did I join? My mother revered Dr. King. And I did too. Compared with the minister and his family, who were Georgia brahmins, the closest thing black America had to a First Family, we were at best among the “little people,” like the inconspicuous disciple Andrew, destined to run their errands and man their ditto machines on the margins of history. Nevertheless, my mother (to me) was regal, aristocratic by virtue of her actions: a sister to Mother Pollard who, when stopped by reporters during the Montgomery boycott, said, “My feets is tired but my soul is rested.” It was that woman and my mother King had in mind when in his 1955 speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church he said, “When the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people — a black people — who injected new meaning into the veins of civilization.’” That was true of him, of course. History knew nothing of Ellesteen Bishop. Since her death it was as if she’d never lived, and now only existed in memory, in me during those times when I thought of her, which were less and less each year, and when I ceased to be, it seemed to me, all vestiges of her would vanish as well. (Often I tried to reconstruct her face, and found I could not remember, say, her ears. How could I forget my own mother’s ears?) In her mind, the minister was a saint. She’d kept his portrait right beside photos of Jesus and John Fitzgerald Kennedy over her bed. More than anything I wanted to help the Movement that had meant so much to her, to do something for him, since I was, as I said, a man of no consequence at all.

“It’s good to see young people like yourself helping out,” the minister said. “How old did you say you were?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Relax, there’s no need to be nervous. Tell me, what exactly do you do around here?”

“Whatever needs doing. Sometimes it’s filing,” I said. “Other times it’s taking notes at meetings and getting out flyers. For the last week I’ve been chauffeuring your wife to speeches on the North Side and sticking around evenings to help Amy watch the apartment. It gives me a chance to catch up on my studies.”

“You’re in school, then?”

“I was … until last year. I left when my mother passed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, nodding. “And your father—”

“I never knew him.”

He glanced away, clearing his throat. “What were you working on? In school, I mean.”

“Philosophy.”

All at once his eyes brightened, as if I’d called the name of an old friend. “When there’s time,” he said, “you should let me look over some of your papers. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to put everything aside and freely discuss ideas. Who were you reading?”

“I left off with Nietzsche.”

From the distaste on his face, the deep frown, one would have thought I’d said I was studying the Devil.

“Have you read Brightman?”

“Not yet.”

“Do,” he urged. “No one else makes perfect sense to me. Get the Nietzsche out of your system. He’s seductive for children — all that lust for power — but he’s really the one we’re fighting against.” He stood up, reaching into his wrinkled suitcoat slung over the back of a bedside chair for a pack of cigarettes. “Think about it.”

“I will, sir, except right now we’ve got something … pretty strange outside.”

“Strange?” He pursed his lips. “You didn’t say anything about strange before. Let me have it.”

“I think you need to see him for yourself.”

Wearily, he pulled on his wrinkled suitcoat, then his shoes. I could see that the short nap had helped not at all. The grumbling of his belly told me he must be hungry, that he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a day and a half, but checking the flat’s refrigerator, which never kept anything cold, would have to wait until he faced the unsettling reason I’d disturbed his slumber. Another leader, I knew, might have sent me away, calling attention to his trials, his suffering, his fatigue. For King that was out of character. Too many times he’d said, “It is possible for one to be self-centered in his self-sacrifice”—in other words, to use the pain of performing the Lord’s work to seek pity and sympathy. No, he never dwelled upon himself, and, although tired, he buttoned his suitcoat and stepped with jelly-legged exhaustion from the darkened bedroom, forcing his lips into a smile as he followed me down the hallway to the living room.

Waiting in the kiln-hot kitchen, seated in a straight-backed chair, was Amy. I felt her presence before my eyes found the imprint of the simple cross under her white blouse, her denim skirt, and the Afro, an aureole black as crow’s feathers, framing her face. She kept pushing a pair of black, owl-frame glasses back up the narrow bridge of her nose — a student’s gesture, I’d thought during the first few weeks when she volunteered for the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. Her voice was low and smoky. Some nights it ran rill-like through my head. She was a Baptist, raised since the age of six by her grandmother on Chicago’s South Side after the death of her mother following a beating — one of many — from her father, who worked for the railroad and gambled away his meager earnings at the race track. Thus it was her grandmother — Mama Pearl, as she called her — who’d taken care of Amy. Earlier that summer she’d invited Mama Pearl to drop by the Lawndale flat and meet the minister. And so she did, wheezing up the stairs, crepitations like crackling cellophane sounding in her chest with each breath, struggling with her body’s adipose freight, hauling a brown weathered handbag big enough for a child to crawl into, and announced, “Usually I don’t go nowhere on the third. That’s when my husband comes.” For a second she watched King mischievously, then said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

He shook his head.

“I calls my disability check my husband, it comes on the third,” and she cackled wildly. The staff fell in love with her that day, with her feathery wig that knocked twenty years off her total of seventy-eight, with the way she worked her toothless mouth like a fish while listening to King explain his plans in Chicago, bobbing her head and asking, “Is you, really?” with her head pushed forward, wig askew, and feet planted apart in two shapeless black shoes. She was utterly unselfconscious. Egoless, and flitted round the flat as though she had feet spun from air. Descending like twin trees from her checkered dress were two vein-cabled legs, lumpy in places, bowed, but it was her voice that everyone remembered most. Thinking she might be thirsty, I offered her a soda, which she declined, shaking her head and explaining, “Thank you, dah’ling, I’m tickled, but I bet’ not drink no pop, I might pee on myself.” Her bag was filled with medicine for her heart and high blood pressure, ills of which she was heedless, saying, “Naw, I ain’t supposed to eat salt, but I eats it anyway. I eats anything.”

In point of fact, Mama Pearl was everybody’s grandmother. “There wasn’t nothin’ I didn’t do in the fields,” she said, speaking of her childhood in southern Illinois. Now she lived on Stony Island in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month walkup with no running water, where she passed her time crocheting (she gave the minister a quilt she’d worked on for two years), “eye-shopping” (as she put it) in downtown stores, and fishing, which was her passion. She’d go with what she called another “senior” or Amy, having her granddaughter lug along a bulging bag of fried chicken, cookies, grapes and peaches, a few ribs, and a thermos. For Mama Pearl fishing was a social event, one to be shared as you ate and talked and played whist. Standing ankle-deep in the water, she’d throw out her line, but was almost too afraid of saltwater worms to slice and bait them (they were hairy and huge and had serrated teeth like a saw). During her afternoon at the flat, she brought forth from her enormous bag three canisters of her own home-cooked raspberry, apricot, and cinnamon rugelach, which she distributed to the entire staff. She inspected everything, involved herself with everyone, including me (“Now, you don’t mind my bein’ nosy, do you, Matthew? I was jes ovah there talkin’ to that light-skinned fellah and he didn’t mind”), and giggled like a young girl, “Ain’t I somethin’?” Before leaving she collected SCLC stationery as souvenirs for the other “seniors” in her church and, waving good-bye at the door, assured us all that “I had a re-e-e-al fine time.”

So had we all, especially King, who kissed her hand as she left (again she giggled), and Amy, who seemed aglow whenever she looked at the grandmother who’d taught her Scripture and how to be a woman, how to crochet, that she could use a string and old tin can for fishing just as easily as a pole and line, and that at all times she must remember others. Yes, she’d taken care of Amy well, raising her — or so I thought — to be as pure in love and self-forgetfulness and service as herself, though Amy at twenty, with her brilliant Dorothy Dandridge smile, was drop-dead beautiful. She did not eat meat. Synthetic fabrics, she said, gave her a rash. She had briefly studied drama and modern dance at Columbia College, where I’d first seen her in the hallways, but then she ran short on funds and took whatever temporary job turned up — short-order cook, dayworker, then watching the Lawndale flat after I’d recommended her for the job.

I had my reasons for that.

Compared with her, I was shy and unsure of myself in everything except my studies. Most of the time feelings banged and knocked through me like something trying to break free from inside. But I screwed up my courage and asked her out to dinner a week after she came to work. Amy thought about my request for a moment, her head cocked to one side, and simply replied, “I don’t eat.” I never had the courage to ask her again.

To avoid her eyes, I turned to the minister, who said, “Well, where is he?”

“I told him to wait outside on the steps,” Amy said, pulling her skirt down a little. “I’ll get him. You two go on back to the kitchen. Matthew, show him the I.D.”

The minister asked, “What I.D.?”

From my shirt pocket I extracted a dog-eared card. “She means this.”

The card I handed over as we walked back down the hallway was an expired Illinois state driver’s license issued to one Chaym Smith, birth date 01/15/29, height 5′7″, weight 180, eyes brown. The minister gazed — and gazed — at the worn license, picking at his lip, and finally looked back at me, poking the card with his finger.

“This could be me!”

“That’s what we thought too,” I said.

“Who is this man?”

“We don’t know.”

“But what does he want with me?”

“Sir,” I said, “maybe he should tell you himself.”

I could see the minister was impatient now for some explanation. Minutes passed. In the kitchen, the wall clock ticked softly beside an Ebony magazine calendar. Food smells, sour and sharp, floated from the sink and an unemptied, paper-lined garbage pail beside it. Then from the front room we could hear the door open. Outside, sirens pierced the hot night air. The neighborhood dogs howled. Through the window, I saw flames from burning cars dancing against a dark sky skirling with tear gas and smoke. The night felt wrong. All of it, as if the riot, the looting and lunacy, breakdown and disorder, had torn space and time, destroying some delicate balance or barrier between dimensions — possible worlds — creating a portal for fantastic creatures to pour through. I could not shake that feeling, and it grew all the stronger when Amy entered the kitchen with the man whose driver’s license I’d handed to King. A man without father or mother, like the priest Melchizedek who mysteriously appeared in the Valley of Siddim after the king of Sodom rebelled against Chedorlaomer.

Stepping back a foot, King whispered, “Sweet Jesus …”

“I thought you’d be interested,” I said.

Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father’s commodious, two-story Queen Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with the black poor. Certainly in every darkened, musty pool hall, on every street corner, in every cramped prison cell he’d passed through, the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith — but never quite like this.

He tore his eyes away, then looked back. Smith was still there, his eyes squinted, the faint smile on his lips one part self-protective irony, two parts sarcasm, as if he carried unsayable secrets (or sins) that, if spoken, would send others running from the room. His workshirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees — he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very embodiment of the blues. Then, as the minister knuckled his eyes, Smith, behind his heavy black eyeglasses, beneath his bushy, matted hair and scraggly beard — as rubicund in tint as Malcolm Little’s — began to look less threatening and more like a poor man down on his luck for a long, long time, one who’d probably not eaten in a week. Neglected like the very building we were in. Everything about him was in disrepair. Just as the city’s administration and the flat’s landlord, a white man named John Bender (who was hardly better off than his tenants), had failed to invest in the crumbling eyesore and allowed it to degenerate into a dilapidated, dangerous public health hazard, so no one, it seemed, had invested in Chaym Smith.

For a moment, the minister looked faint. His right hand reached for the back of a kitchen chair to anchor the spinning room and steady himself. He took a deep breath, then shook his visitor’s hand and motioned for him to sit down at the table. “When they said I needed to see you, I had no idea—”

Smith’s lips lifted ever so slightly at the corners. “Thank you for taking the time to see somebody like me, Reverend. I know you busy. But, I swear, ever since nineteen fifty-four, people been telling me I got a twin. Looks is about all we got in common, though. People love you. Especially white people. Sometimes”—he laughed again, at himself it seemed—“I figured God flicked up and missed with me, but He had you for backup.” Smith peered down at his hands, squeezing them together. A dollop of sweat slid from his hairline down his cheek to his chin, and suddenly I had the feeling he was acting, playing a role he’d rehearsed many times, even using black English — a pâté of urban slang and southern idioms — playfully, as one would a toy. “I’ve read your books. Everything I could about you. Caught you on TV more times than I can count. So when I heard you were in Chicago, I figured I had to come by and at least shake your hand.”

“You live here, then?” asked King.

“All my life, mainly on the South Side. That’s where I grew up, in one of the county’s juvenile homes. I reckon I been everywhere and done a li’l bit of everything. Most of it”—he laughed again—“come to a whole lot of nothing. Not like with you. I went in the service when I was twenty, the year after Truman signed Executive Order 9981. That put me right in the middle of Korea, but I was lucky, you know? I cruised through two years without a scratch. Guess it was ’cause I was on my knees every night, praying God’d get me outta there safely. See, I trusted Him. That’s how I was raised. ’Bout a month before I was to fly home, I was filling out college entrance forms. Day before my plane left, I walked outside the base to celebrate with a buddy of mine named Stackhouse and smoke a li’l Korean boo — and what you think! My boot-heel came right down on a land mine. I left part of my leg — and all of Stackhouse — back in Pyongyang.”

Smith lifted his left trouser leg, and my stomach lurched. The sweep of his shin was crooked. Brown flesh below the knob of his knee was twisted, muscleless, blackened as crisp and crinkly as cellophane. Amy’s hands flew to her lips, stifling a moan. And then, suddenly, Smith looked straight at me, flashing that ironical, almost erotic smirk again, as if somehow we were co-conspirators, or maybe he knew something scandalous about me, though we’d met only minutes earlier.

“The doctors spent a year rebuilding that from the femur to the metatarsal. My jaws were wired for months. Reverend, I tell you, after that — after my discharge — I just drifted and drank. I stayed in the East, sorta like being in exile, till I healed. I knew every bartender by his first name in Kyoto, Jakarta, and Rangoon. Finally come back to the States, and got me a li’l room at 3721 Indiana Avenue, and I was doin’ okay for a while, trying to stay dry and go to school over at Moody Bible Institute — I always wanted to preach — then things kinda … fell apart for me again …”

The minister bent forward, squeezing his hands, unaware he was mirroring perfectly Smith’s posture. “How do you mean?”

Smith drew a deep breath. (King took one too, as if slowly they were slipping into synchronization.) “I ain’t sure what happened. I don’t look for trouble, sir, but sometimes trouble just comes looking for me. Maybe it’s bad karma, or something’s wrong with my ch’i like they say in the East, I can’t figure it.”

He was working nights as a custodian, said Chaym Smith, and taking classes in the day. Back then he was an insatiable reader, the sort of autodidact who (like Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman) could absorb whole paragraphs at a single glance; his recall was so good he barely had to study for his exams. Sometimes when he came home three young boys — Powell, Jay, and Lester — would be playing on the steps or directly in front of the building in the street. They were good kids, he thought. Wild, but that was because each of them had a different father. In effect, no father. And with no Daddy, they saw everything — and anything — as permissible. He knew what that was, not knowing your father, but feeling that the indifferent sonuvabitch who brought you into the world was out there somewhere, faceless and unreachable, silent and remote, someone you needed and hated all at the same time until the moment came that you damned him, renounced Him, and moved on. Nearly every day Smith saw those boys, and he liked them — he bought the trio candy and Tales of the Unexpected comic books at the corner store, shot a few hoops with them on Saturday when he was tired of studying, and after getting permission from their mother, Juanita Lomax, who was young and pretty and seemed to like him whenever she bumped into Smith in the hallway, he drove them in his battered secondhand Corvair to see Sidney Poitier’s portrayal of a black soldier in Korea in All the Young Men. It reminded him of his time in Korea, and he hoped Juanita’s boys would pick up something positive from Poitier’s performance, though he couldn’t be sure they had, given the way Powell and Jay hooted and threw popcorn at the screen when Alan Ladd’s bigoted character came on. Still, they told him they’d had a great evening when Smith brought them back to their mother’s basement apartment.

As it turned out, Juanita was not there when he brought her boys home. Thing is, this was nothing new. Often she left them alone to fend for and feed themselves, usually potatoes, which they peeled with a pocketknife, threw into a handleless skillet in the closet-sized kitchen, then proceeded to burn until the four dark, below-ground rooms, which always smelled damp, clouded with smoke. Smith always worried they’d set the place on fire. That night, however, he’d filled their stomachs at White Castle, so he was sure they’d do no cooking and go straight to bed.

His own tiny but tidy room was three flights up, one of the front bedrooms in a flat rented by Vera Thomas — a kind, brown-skinned woman about thirty — and her mother, an elderly woman who often said she wished he, Smith, had been her son, what with the way he studied and worked so hard after he got out of the service, and him with a disability too. Smith said he turned his key in the door and walked through the darkened living room — it was by then nearly midnight — then entered his bedroom, clicking on the light. Under his covers, wearing only a smile, was Juanita. Vera, she said, let her into his room when she explained he was out with her boys. She had something to give him to express her thanks for his being so kind to her kids. He asked her what that was. She said, Come here and see. Although he could not remember undressing, or the details of what he said — or might have promised her — Smith spent that night under the covers with Juanita Lomax.

The next week he was in court.

How he got there even he couldn’t rightly say. The police had picked him up on his job. Later he learned that Juanita had sworn on a stack of Bibles that he’d forced himself on her. Fortunately for Smith, this was not a case the judge wanted to hear. Juanita argued — as she had twice earlier in the same court — that he was obliged to make her an honorable woman. No, the judge said, he would have to do nothing of the kind. He lectured Juanita not to take up the court’s time this way again, but once they were outside again on the street, her waiting at the bus stop and crying, he stepped up behind her and said yes, he would marry her, if that was what she wanted.

King lit a fresh cigarette off the one he had going. “Was that what you wanted?”

Smith shrugged. “I guess so. I wanted them boys to have a father. I figured Juanita’n me could come together on that.”

“I think you did an honorable thing.”

“Naw,” Again, that satiric grin. “I was a fool.”

He’d tried, said Smith, to provide for the boys and their mother, but maybe — who knows? — he didn’t try hard enough or just wasn’t meant to be married, or maybe he had an inverted Midas touch so that everything he brushed against transmogrified into crap. He gave up going to school, he got a second job with a moving company, and after two years he was able to get them into a bigger place, a housing project, in Altgeld Gardens, though it seemed like even with two jobs there was hardly anything left at the end of the month after he paid the bills, and somehow — he wasn’t sure how — what little was left he wound up putting on another bottle of whiskey because he needed that to wind down and get to sleep some nights; and there wasn’t much time either to go to church after he took a third job as a night watchman on the weekends, or to spend with the boys, who started cutting school and keeping bad company, or with Juanita, who, he discovered, liked Colombian Gold as much as he did Johnny Walker (Black), so much so — according to one of his neighbors — that she slipped away in the afternoons when he was working to see another man who sold exactly what she wanted, though his neighbor said he had no idea how Juanita was paying for it, and when he confronted her with this the fights began, him accusing her of infidelity, her damning him for his drinking, their shouting going on sometimes all night, so loud other residents threatened to call the police, and her boys couldn’t bear that, naturally; they took to staying away from the place as long as they could, and after a time so did he, feeling thankful he was so mired in nickel-dime jobs that he had a way to escape that household, escape thinking about himself, escape the near hysteria he felt when he realized his life was a nightmare, a ghastly joke on everything he’d once dreamed of becoming. He rode the streets for hours some evenings after work, simply to avoid returning home, and it was on one such night in 1963, after cruising the South Side until he was nearly out of gas, that he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell he lived. Try as he might, he could not remember the address or recognize the street. Other things were gone too, whole quadrants of his memory. Unable to get home, he pulled up in front of a police station and told them his predicament, and they held him overnight for evaluation.

They held him for a long time, first at the station, then at an institution in Elgin, because when the police knocked on his door, discovered it open, then stepped inside, they found Juanita’s three boys strangled in their beds and pieces of their mother distributed here and there throughout the apartment. When they told him, Smith wept in his cell. He swore he knew nothing about it. Twice he passed a polygraph test. They could not convict him of the crime, but they did send him to Elgin, where he worked sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes with other patients cleaning up the grounds around the hospital, and met with doctors who spent two years helping him patch together the broken pieces of his personality. When he was released, there was nowhere for him to go except to Vera Thomas, who gave him back his old room and accepted the little he could offer her from what he made doing odd jobs, here and there, on the South Side.

After a silence, Smith and King drew breath at the same instant. The minister let Smith speak first.

“Like I said, Reverend, I been tryin’ like hell to get back on my feet, to do somethin’ worthwhile with my life.”

“If we can achieve our goals for equality here, I think things will be better for you.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Excuse me?” The minister scratched his cheek.

“I guess you think the Lord puts us all here with a definite purpose, don’t you?”

“That’s right. Everyone is equal in His eyes.”

“I don’t see that.”

King was silent, perhaps uncertain of what to say, or so challenged by the sharpness of Smith’s voice that his own thoughts were stilled.

“Sir, I need work. That’s all I’m asking for. Right now I can’t rub two dimes together. Problem is, there ain’t too many places that’ll hire me. But I figure there is maybe one thing I can do, if you’re willin’, and I been praying night and day you will be.”

“What is that?”

“I read that when you was in Montgomery you got over forty death threats a day — is that so?”

“Yes,” the minister said, nodding, “and I still get them.”

“That woman who stabbed you? Weren’t you signing books when that happened? The knife come within an inch of your heart, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I coulda been there instead of you,” said Smith.

“What?”

“When you go somewhere or leave a place, I could be there too, and if somebody’s tryin’ to hurt you, they won’t know whichaway to turn. That’s all I’m askin’, that you let me do somethin’—maybe the only thing in this world — I can do.”

“No.” The minister stood up so suddenly the back of his legs sent his chair skidding a foot behind him. “Absolutely not. I could never agree to anything like that.”

Smith smiled bitterly. “Thought you might say that. You ain’t the first person to turn me away. Or to take a shot at me ’cause I favor you so much.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I been catching hell since you come to Chicago.

Last week a couple of boys pushed me off the El platform.” Smith measured five inches between his forefinger and thumb. “I was ’bout that far from landin’ on the third rail. Lots of people know where you’re stayin’ in town, but some don’t. They see me and come to my place. Some of ’em tore up my room. Scared my landlady so much she’s askin’ me to leave. But where am I gonna go? Hell, I can’t walk down the street or go to the store without somebody stoppin’ me. Some of ’em spit in my face. That’s colored as well as white. That’s why I come here. I figure if I’m catchin’ hell ’cause of you, I might’s well catch it for you instead.”

“You’ve no place to stay?”

“Not after tomorrow.”

The minister made a sharp intake of breath. He rubbed the back of his neck, then paced back and forth in the kitchen, perhaps thinking — as I had been all evening — of that ancient Christian story of the couple who found a bedraggled old man at their door, invited him inside, fed and comforted him, and only after their guest left discovered he was the Nazarene. Finally King took his seat. “Would you all come here with me at the table? Mr. Smith has suffered much. I’d like to say a prayer for him.”

Amy and I sat down; she was to my left, the minister to my right, and Smith directly in front of me. We joined hands and closed our eyes. Looking back, I cannot recall the whole content of King’s prayer, but it was appropriate, an affirmation that all, regardless of circumstance, were loved by the Lord. And I would not have opened my eyes before he’d finished, but I felt pressure beneath the table on my left foot, a gentle tapping like a lover’s signal. Thinking this was Amy, hoping it was so, I let my lids blink open, and saw that Smith had never closed his eyes. He was staring at us — like a fugitive peering at a comfortable bourgeois family through their window as they eat dinner, oblivious to his presence — and on his face was that unsettling smile as he critically scrutinized King, then Amy, who gripped his hand tightly (heaven knows what she was thinking). And then, tilting his head, tapping my foot again, he winked.

I felt my face stretch. I squeezed shut my eyes, but his afterimage burned in the space behind my lids long after the prayer was done.

King turned to Smith and said, “Could you step outside?”

After Smith left, the minister rubbed his forehead. “I swear to God, I don’t know how to help this man, but I feel we should do something for him. What he proposes … it’s just too dangerous!”

“Sir,” I said, “it sounds like he’s already a target. You might say his resemblance to you has marked him.”

“Yes, yes.” He kneaded his lower lip. “Amy, when your grandmother was here, did Mama Pearl say she grew up downstate?”

“Yes,” said Amy. “Her old house is there. It’s empty. No one is living there now.”

“Could he stay there?”

“I guess so.”

“I’d like you and Matthew to stay with him, at least until the disturbance is over and we’re finished here in Chicago. I want you to work with him. Get him back on his feet. Help him understand what the Movement’s about — and have him sign the Commitment Blank.”

“What about you?” Amy asked. “Won’t you need us here?”

“I think we’ll be all right. We’ll find somebody to replace you.” He stepped toward the kitchen door. Turning, he added, “I’ll see that you’re both compensated for this, of course,” and then he started toward the bedroom and stopped. “One other thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You keep that man away from my wife, you hear?”

I assured him we would not let Smith, who was still waiting outside, anywhere near his family. I walked down the hallway, opened the front door, and found our visitor sitting on the top step, smoking. Keeping a few feet between us, I said, “Chaym, it’s okay. Doc’s going to find something for you to do.” Cautiously, I smiled. “He thinks you might be able to help.”

“Yeah, and maybe I can do something special for you too. You interest me, Bishop. You’ve got promise.”

“For what?”

The only answer Smith gave was his mocking, mordant grin.

I swallowed with difficulty. When I spoke, my voice splintered, and he seemed to enjoy that. “I’ll call you tomorrow with more details. Is that all right? I really do hope he gives you a job.”

“A job?” Now Smith was descending the first few steps into the shadows, his profile lighted in such a way that I could see only fragments of his face, like pieces of an unfinished puzzle, or a mask. “I don’t want just a job, Bishop. Uh-uh. I want a li’l of what the good doctor in there has got in such great abundance.”

“What is that?”

Now I could see his face not at all, though I heard his shoes striking the lower stair treads, and from below, on the lightless levels where he stood, like a voice rising up beneath the ground, I thought I heard him say, Immortality.