Dreamer

3

Twenty-four hours later, on July 18, Citizen King gave his consent. Most of that night, amidst billowing smoke from burning stores and ricocheting pistol reports in the darkness, I hastily loaded the trunk of my battered old Chevelle with cardboard boxes of film and files about the Movement and the minister. Amy agreed with King that it would be best to separate Smith from the city for a while. Removing him far from his old haunts, the locations that reminded him of his losses, might be just the caisson required for restoring his life. Downstate, in rural Jackson County (fondly called Little Egypt by locals who’d named their hot, dusty towns Cairo and Thebes after Old Testament cities), a few miles from Makanda, Mama Pearl owned a hundred-year-old farmhouse handed down from her father. For two weeks that would be, as Amy called it, our Nest.

Provided we escaped the South Side in one piece.

The riot’s devastation spread over 140 blocks, spilling into Slumdale, and we had to get across town to Smith’s room. The minister was now on the West Side, preaching brotherhood and peaceful revolution on streets that ran slick with blood. Black blood, as if in the city (any city) ritual acts of murder had to be repeated night after night to renew the city itself. I feared the fires might burn forever, akin to brimstone, for the influence of the neocolonial empire King so relentlessly criticized stretched from Southeast Asia to Rhodesia, Colombia to Watts. One block from the minister’s place, the police were shoving women and children into paddy wagons. Teenagers tossed Molotov cocktails at squad cars. At the corner of Sixteenth two white patrolmen weighted down by duty-belts chased a black teenager in blue jeans and a baseball cap through clouds of tear gas eerily backlit by the blaze from a torched pawnshop. Looters spilled from the building, hauling away portable Motorola televisions, shotguns, bolt-action rifles, and radios piled high in wobbly-wheeled shopping carts.

When the boy slipped on broken glass from the store’s shattered window the cops fell upon him, cracking his bones with a flurry of blows I felt echo through my own body. My stomach clenched. Spotting another looter, the cops took off, leaving the boy bleeding on the sidewalk. As in a dream, I watched myself running toward the spot where the boy lay rocking back and forth, his legs drawn up to his chest. He was blinded by blood streaming into his eyes. Teeth hung loose in his head. “Don’t move,” I said. “Let me help you, brother.” I reached down, holding out my right hand so the boy could rise. Without warning, he kicked straight up at my knees, bringing me crashing to the sidewalk. I felt blows falling across my face, breaking my glasses. He buried his shoe in my stomach. I felt his fingers snaking through my pockets, emptying them of my wallet, keys, coins. I thought, All right, now he’s finished. But I was wrong. He began kicking me again, intent on killing me for the thrill of it. I could barely see, but I crawled to the curb, pulling myself along the glass-sprinkled concrete to a parked car, and rolled under it, only to feel his fingers tighten on my right ankle. He pulled me back into the open, bringing his heel down on my back. I knew then I was going to die. Just another casualty of the night’s rioting. I saw him reach behind his back into the waistband of his trousers, and as if by magic a gleaming switchblade appeared in his hand, which he raised high above his head, his eyes glittering to slits as he chose the spot on my chest where he would bury the blade. Then, miraculously, I heard a crack like wood snapping cartilage. The boy cried out. Moments later, he was gone, blending back into the night, replaced by Chaym Smith, who stood above me, breathing heavily and holding a two-by-four he’d found in the street and shouting for me to give him my keys and get in the car before we all were mistaken for rioters and rounded up with the rest.

“Thank you—”

“Sama-sama.”

“What?”

“I said you’re welcome, in Indonesian. Just get in the goddamn car, Bishop.”

“Chaym … if you hadn’t stopped him—”

“Uh-hunh, I know. You’d be dead. C’mon, let’s go.”

Smith slid over from the passenger side to the driver’s seat and hunched over the wheel. Still shaken, unable to keep my hands from trembling, I gathered my things off the pavement and climbed in back behind Amy, who was holding a shopping bag full of King’s old clothing. I fumbled through my coat, hoping I still had the three- by four-inch copy of the King James Bible, a gift long ago from my mother, which I carried as a kind of talisman for times of trouble, or just to study when I rode the subway. Not that I really felt much anymore when I fingered the Books tissue-thin pages. Try as I might, I no longer could breathe life into the vision the Bible embodied — or, for that matter, into any system of meaning, though I desperately wanted to, and always kept the Book nearby out of habit, often just letting its pages wing open to a passage selected by chance, hoping someday it would speak to me again.

Amy turned round in her seat and removed my glasses, which were dangling off my face, then took one of the minister’s handkerchiefs and held it against the fresh cuts on my forehead. “Oh, Matthew,” she groaned, “why didn’t you stay by the car?”

“Yeah,” said Smith, “you’re lucky I decided not to wait for you and came on my own. You owe me one, Bishop. Don’t forget that. And what the hell d’you think you were doing anyway?”

“I was just trying to help,” I said. “He probably thought I was the police coming back.”

“Sure,” said Smith, “that’s why he was cleaning out your pockets, right?” He laughed wickedly. “Guys like you got a lot to learn. You really do. Good thing you weren’t in Korea with me. The enemy just loved would-be missionary types like you. Know what those crafty bastards would do if five of us were out on patrol? They’d wound two Yanks, knowin’ that’d end the fight because it would take three men to get the injured back to the base. And we had to get them back, bein’ Americans and Christians and all that. They counted on it. They saw it as a weakness that we couldn’t leave our own behind. And you know what else I saw, Bishop? You know what they’d do when they killed a black soldier and a white one? They’d cut off their heads, put the white one on the black man’s, body and the black one on the white boy. It was a joke, okay? I saw that, and it showed me there’s two kinds of people in this world. Predators and prey. Lions and lunch. You see it any other way, buddy, and people will chump you off.” He glanced back at the little book I held. “If you’d been through half of what I have, you’d put that Bible away and learn what time it is — or learn how to read it right.”

“That’s unfair,” said Amy. “Matthew was just trying to help that boy.”

“Yeah, and you saw what happened. Some people can’t be helped. I know that. You reach down to pull somebody up, he’s liable to drag you down to the bottom with him, then spit on you to boot. Did I hear you call him brother?” Smith chortled, his head tipping back. “You didn’t even know his name! Did you call him that ’cause he was black, or was that a church thing? You ever thought about what brothers are really like? Romulus and Remus, say. Or Jacob and Esau? How they can hate each other, especially if one is doing better? See, if I were you, I’d forget about that brotherhood malarkey, and remember what they said during the French Revolution. Fraternité ou la mort. What I’m saying — and you may not like this — is that in the Struggle, who you are is less important than what you are: a splib, an outcast united to others by oppression, by blood, and let me tell you, buddy, that’s one frail, forced confederacy, with some brothers and sisters who can be downright scary when they want to close ranks against the racist enemy, some of ’em all but saying, Be my brother or I’ll kill you!”

“No,” Amy said, shocked. “How can you say that? I thought you said you wanted to preach.”

“What’d you think I was just doing?”

“I mean, be a right and proper minister!”

“Oh … well, I did. Once.”

“What about now? Last night you talked differently. You were almost begging for help. But tonight you don’t sound like the same person at all. Which are you?”

Smith was quiet, his hands squeezed round the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock. Then he rummaged through his trouser pocket, found a linty, flecked stick of Doublemint gum, and stuck the wad into his cheek. “Sometimes I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you can help me figure that out.” He looked sheepishly at her. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t know what I was saying. It’s been like that since I was at Elgin. Can you forgive me?”

At that Amy softened. Her profile from where I sat dissolved from irritation to sympathy, as if it was the minister himself who’d appealed to her for understanding, seeing how he’d looked in a flickerflash trompe l’oeil uncannily like King when he apologized. For an instant I could have sworn Smith was playing her masterfully like a finely tuned lyre, one keyed to her (all of our) affection for King, fluidly shifting from one mask to another as the occasion demanded, as if maybe the self was a fiction — or, if not that, a multiplicity of often conflicting profiles. He seemed full of Machiavellian deceits and subterfuges. To my astonishment, he glided from the tribal languages of the Academy to Niggerese, a skill most educated black men possessed (myself included), but in Smith’s hands, black slang became a weapon used for startling effect, like tossing a grenade into the middle of a polite tea party. As he put rubber to the road, tear gas drifted into the car, the shock of inhaling it like breathing in burning coals or hellfire when it filled the tissues of my lungs. I pressed one hand over my mouth, but I couldn’t breathe or see. Smith gave more gas to the Chevelle, gunning it through an intersection, the speedometer riding sixty, then he stomped on the brake and began to skid. Up ahead, an elderly barefoot black man, wearing only wrinkled blue pajamas, held his bloody forehead and stepped blindly into the beam of the Chevelle’s headlights. Smith cut the wheel hard, running the car onto the sidewalk. A mailbox sprang up in the way, and he cranked the wheel again, passing just close enough to throw gravel against the man’s kneecaps but leaving him otherwise untouched as the car slammed through another intersection and at last came to rest in front of Smith’s building.

Amy was shaking. “You almost hit that man!”

“Fool shouldn’ta been out.” Smith rolled his window down, now that the tear gas was behind us, and coughed. “Let’s get my things. It won’t take long, I don’t have that much.”

Actually, it would take less time than he knew. All of Smith’s belongings were piled on the street and stairs in front of 3721 Indiana Avenue. “I don’t believe this,” he whispered. On the sidewalk his shoulders slumped; he looked from his possessions dumped like refuse up to his landlady’s third-floor window. He climbed the stair, favoring his left leg, whipped out his key, and stuck it about a quarter-inch into the door before it stopped. He twisted it once. Twice, then it broke off in his hand. “She did it,” he was still whispering, staring at the fragment on his palm. “Mrs. Thomas locked me out …”

“It’s all right,” said Amy. “We can put some of this in Matthew’s car and come back later.”

Smith threw his key into the street and headed for the rear of the building. “Do what you want with it.”

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“Got some business to tend to. I’ll be back.”

After he disappeared into the alley, Amy glanced at me, shrugged, then began loading Smith’s belongings into the trunk and backseat. I moved to help, handing her a framed photograph of two young black servicemen so fit their uniforms seemed molded to their muscular frames, both grinning toward the camera, one of them (Smith, I was sure) holding up two fingers like rabbit ears behind the head of a friend I guessed was Stackhouse; and I found several paintings, one canvas portraying Jesus as a work-toughened carpenter, rendered (Amy told me) in the style of G. Bierman’s The Ascension; another — a watercolor in the manner of Kawase Hasui — depicted an ancient temple all but hidden by jungle growth and was entitled Borobudur, while a third showed a sparsely furnished hospital room in Elgin as van Gogh might have imagined it, and in the last I saw a young black woman with three good-looking boys done in the vein of a Matisse. I stared at these paintings for the longest time, lost in them, startled by Smith’s talent, his shape-shifting ability to change styles as rapidly as others changed their garments, and then Amy was telling me to hurry up, so I moved on, passing to her some shoes eaten away at the soles, slacks and shirts so old they could only have come from rummage sales or Goodwill; there were a few dented pots and pans, a battered saxophone, a worn Bible with notecards inserted throughout its pages, sandals made of rice straw, a straight razor, a cloth bag with Chinese characters I could not read, a wicker hat, a Smith & Wesson.357 (Model 27), a seven-inch Army knife in its stiff leather sheath, and wrapped in a quilted blanket a shabby black robe and a tatami mat. Judging by the cardboard boxes at my feet, whatever Smith lacked in clothing he more than made up for in books. There were volumes from Moody Bible Institute, translations from the Coptic Gnostic Library (unearthed in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt), the Rhineland sermons of Meister Eckhart, the Dhammapada, texts on the Sufi and Tantrism, and on their front pages, in their margins, he had scribbled his commentaries in a script so small, so microscopic, it might have come from the hand of a mathematician. In other boxes I found Japanese pornography — magazines with page upon glossy page of photos showing teenagers (some of them dressed as schoolgirls) doing things I dare not describe, but which I guessed he used for masturbation, and then! — I saw playing cards depicting a different, more terrifying kind of pornography: Thai pictures taken in morgues, showing bodies in different stages of decomposition, used by Theravada monks for meditation on the transitory nature of all things.

With each box and shopping bag of Smith’s things I found myself falling through his past and into passageways of a constantly mutating soul which, I’d wager, even his therapists at Elgin had not fully charted. Poking through a shopping bag, I pulled out expired passports stamped by half the countries left of Hawaii, a sketchbook filled with his poetry and drawings — penciled images of well-known locations in the Loop, and possible portraits of what his own father might look like (one was a derelict feeding himself from a Dumpster, another was Daddy King) — hypodermic needles I was afraid to handle, and eight scrapbooks in which he’d pasted news articles about, I thought, himself. I looked again. These were stories about King, some of them dating back to the Montgomery bus boycott. He’d saved everything — from the Time magazine “Man of the Year” cover story on King to cartoonist Mort Drucker’s satire of the Movement in Mad magazine. Smith had flagged the numerous articles critical of King, as if he took a delicious pleasure in publicity that diminished the man he so resembled and clearly revered.

I was dazed, staring at these pages, when he came back, sweating, with the scent of gasoline on his clothes. Climbing into the car, he said, “We got to go. Right now.”

“We’re not finished,’ I said. “We’re still loading your things.”

“Forget them! We got to go now.”

Dropping one of the boxes, I climbed in. I cranked the starter as Amy closed the trunk and got in the back, then I eased out into the street. Smith grumbled, “Keep driving,” so I floored the pedal and headed south. In my rearview mirror I saw smoke billowing from his building on Indiana Avenue. Smith grinned.

“Chaym—”

“Don’t look back.” He stretched out and closed his eyes for the six-hour, three-hundred-mile trip downstate. “Musta been the rioters done that. Gonna try to get some rest.”

Amy kicked off her leather sandals, then curled up in a corner of the backseat, her head pillowed on one of the bags from Smith’s apartment. All the way to Champaign I drove in silence broken only by news reports on the radio. During the night National Guardsmen had clanked into the city like centurions to reinforce local police. The mayor’s office placed blame for the devastation on King’s presence in Chicago. Listening to that newscast, I found it easy to conclude there was precious little light in politics, which, I remembered, Henry Adams had called the “systematic organization of hatreds.” King’s efforts in Chicago had pried open a Pandora’s box of racial paradoxes, not the least being that in the wake of Black Power’s appeal in the northern ghettos his political approach was unraveling at the seams. Like so many who admired the King of 1963, the piecemeal reformist Daley championed his success in Selma, but along with his six black aldermen who controlled wards on the South and West sides, he would not concede to the anticapitalist King of 1966 that his city was a bastion of bigotry based on economic exploitation. On local television, Rev. Joseph H. Jackson pointed out to the minister that Chicago had problems but was not the Deep South. Furthermore, some said, the objectives of the Movement were hazy. Many blacks wondered if one of the fundamental goals of freedom should be the chance to live next door to white people in places like Cicero and Hyde Park. To be sure, the SCLC proved housing discrimination by sending black allies to real estate agents, who steered them away from properties they eagerly sold later that same afternoon to whites. But could a family living on $4,000 a year afford a home with a view of Lake Michigan in Winnetka? King’s critics dismissed the battle for that sort of integration as bourgeois. And for all the riveting drama of the minister’s previous campaigns, his desperate bid at sparking a fire of social change in America’s second-largest city, and regaining the reins of the Movement from modern-day Zealots eager to pick up the gun, led only that July to men and women foot-weary from marching and fires in the streets that gutted only the black ghetto. The minister traveled by police escort (many derided that) to bars, churches, and meeting halls, begging angry black crowds to replace violence with mass action aimed at disruption, sending the city officials a collective Thoreauvian no to institutionalized inequality.

Yet I wondered if the legal and histrionic tactics of the Movement might one day prove more costly than anyone imagined. One could not hold a referendum for racial justice in America, a vote, because — as everyone knew — whites would surely cast their ballots for, at best, gradual change. And in the South for no change at all. What the nation needed in the early 1960s was to be electrified by having the evils at its core uncovered. The minister was a master at that. And at enlisting the powers of the federal government to accelerate the end of American apartheid. But I wondered: Would the wounds uncovered ever heal? At times I felt uncomfortable with the SCLC’s and NAACP’s reliance, their dependency and complete faith in Washington’s clout, the protection it offered black people — but at what price? Nothing, my mother once told me, came without a price; there was always a trade-off of some kind, even though one might not see it clearly in the beginning. Mightn’t whites come to perceive Negroes as no longer a victimized class but a privileged one, thus leading to a resentment and a lack of respect and racial disdain greater than anything witnessed during the era of Jim Crow? Mightn’t too much reliance on the federal government, even in private affairs such as rearing a family, lead to the inability to do for oneself, unhampered by bad laws, that was the Movement’s original purpose?

I switched channels and found an all-music station playing the Supremes, then looked back at Amy. She slept with one finger brushing her lips, and as I looked at her I felt lost. Brown freckles ran right across her nose, and since she lay facing the east, sunlight brought out highlights in her hair. She seemed to grow quieter and sleep more deeply with each county we put between ourselves and the dislocating spirit of the city. Back there, her apartment had five locks on the door. On top of that, she lived in a section of town so crimeridden that she was obliged to padlock every door inside too. It was a frightful way to live, in fear, barricaded behind your door each evening, wondering if a neighbor might kill you in your sleep, and it was that dreadful situation the minister hoped to change.

I knew his odds were bad.

The nonviolent Movement drew successfully from the ranks of the black middle class, students at Fisk, and liberal whites in its early days, but stalled and sputtered in poor, grassroots communities. King himself subjected it to this criticism, saying voting rights and integrated lunch counters cost the nation nothing. The new campaign — class struggle — would indeed be costly. Yet over and over he insisted that the Movement needed to wage war on two fronts. First, changing the souls of men so that they not only protested for peace but in themselves were peace embodied, loving in even life’s smallest affairs. And, second, he called for changing society so the soul might have a field in which to flourish. Neither front, he said, could be ignored, for one reinforced the other. Tremendous effort had gone into the second theater of battle, I thought. Far less into the first. So little, in fact, that as I steered south through the land of Lincoln, down a steaming highway dotted with roadkill between Springfield and Centralia, as Amy and Smith slept, my thoughts reached back to a speech the earlier “reformist” King delivered in Chicago, one that challenged and chided me when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964. That speech had looked inward, not out. It emphasized being fully alive in the present, which I found appealing, because didn’t dwelling on the Promised Land or heaven or the Workers’ Paradise postpone full immersion in life to the distant future, so that since the Civil War black people could never be at peace in the present, comfortable with the past, and were waiting, always waiting, for a day of redemption that forever receded like the horizon? Two years earlier King had not spoken that way. He’d said, “When you are behind in a foot race, the only way to get ahead is to run faster than the man in front of you. So when your white roommate says he’s tired and goes to sleep, you stay up and burn the midnight oil.” He spoke from experience, having maintained only a 2.48 grade point average at Morehouse College; by the time he left Crozer Seminary he was student body president and class valedictorian. He talked of his father — who, like old Joe Kennedy, was not an easy father to have — a poor, barely literate boy whose grandfather Jim Long had been used by his master to breed slaves; Daddy King often said, “I came from nowhere.” At age fifteen, he could read but not write. Just the same, determination to win the hand of a Spelman seminary student named Alberta Williams, and to rise in Atlanta’s black world, riveted him to study, “until I was falling asleep saying my lessons to myself.”

But Chaym Smith was clearly not Daddy King. And he, Amy, and I were the most unlikely of teams with a task so impossible that the thought of it kept my Protestant stomach perpetually cramped, knotted, and queasy from the moment King asked us to work together.

Beside me, Smith — our Melchizedek — dozed. I noticed that the muscles around his mouth and eyes had relaxed, and for the time he was submerged in himself, in that depthless place of dreamless sleep where we spend a third of our lives, he looked serene, almost cherubic, the contours of his cheeks rounded, all the tension in his normally furrowed brow gone, as if a fire somewhere in him had been extinguished. In dreamless sleep, a king was not a king, nor a pauper poor; no one was old or young, male or female, cursed or blessed, educated or ignorant, sinner or saint. (And even in our dreams, there was no apartheid, no segregation between black and white.) This was the face, very Apollonian, I associated most closely with the minister in old photos I’d seen of him when he was a boy who loved to sing “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus” and sat rapt with attention behind the pulpit of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Church and his father stood ramrod straight, preaching with one finger pointed toward heaven. Or in other pictures from 1951 when he happily posed, like a prince who knew a great kingdom awaited him, beside the stately presence of his mother, with just the slightest sprinkling of pimples on his forehead and one lone pustule on his left cheek. Smith awoke, caught me glancing sideways at him, and smirked.

“Like what you see, eh?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look so much like him. Yet you’re so different. Chaym, I didn’t know you were a painter—”

“Yeah,” he yawned, now looking very Dionysian. “I painted some when I was institutionalized. The doctors thought it’d help me heal. As you can see, I ain’t no famous beauty, nobody’s gonna mistake me for Harry Belafonte, but I was hoping that if I created something beautiful, I could offer that to others. Something that would live after I was gone. A li’l piece of me, you know, that’d endure. Problem was, I was second-rate. Naw, I didn’t say bad. What I did — everything I’ve done — was good. Thing is, being just good don’t get you to heaven. And I’m just too mediocre for hell. God don’t like near misses. Runner-ups and also-rans. Second-best means no banana. Purgatory, I been thinkin’, was designed for people like me … and you.”

“Me?”

“That’s right. Who’s your daddy?”

“I … don’t know.”

“That’s what I figured. You like most of the rest of us. Brothers, I mean. You’re illegitimate. No father prepared the way for you. You want to be among the anointed, the blessed — to belong. I saw that in you the moment we met. Nothing’s worked for you, I can see that. You ain’t never gonna have fame or fortune. Maybe not even a girl. I’ll bet you ain’t had pussy since pussy had you. When you die, it’ll be like you never lived. That’s why I said I think I can help you.”

“With what?”

“Your salvation,” he said. “You work real hard at being good, Bishop. Anybody can see you’re a Boy Scout. Square as a Necker’s cube. But you don’t fit. You got to remember that nobody on earth likes Negroes. Not even Negroes. We’re outcasts. And outcasts can’t never create a community. I been to a lot of places and it’s the same everywhere. We’re despised worldwide. You ever thought we might be second-class citizens because generally we are second-rate?”

I almost slammed on the brakes. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me right. You got to face up to the fact of black — or human — mediocrity damned near across the board. Outside of entertainment and athletics (just another kind of entertainment), we don’t count for shit, boy. Ain’t you never felt that being a Negro means you always got the guilty suspicion you done something wrong but you ain’t sure what? And don’t blame it on bigotry. Nobody believes that tired old excuse anymore. What you got to face, Bishop — hey, watch the road, you’re swerving — is the possibility that we are, as a tribe, descended from the first of two brothers whose best just couldn’t hack it. And, it wasn’t his fault. See, if you check that Bible of yours, you’ll find the world didn’t begin with love. It kicked off with killing and righteous hatred and ressentiment. Envy, I’m saying, is the Negro disease. We got the stain, the mark. Nothing else really explains our situation, far as I can see.”

It took all my strength to keep from driving right off the road. “That’s insane, it’s certifiably mad—”

“I been that, sure. Got the papers to prove it. I was crazy as a coot after what happened to Juanita and her kids. But not now. I’ve been on the outside long enough to know that hatred is healthy — even holy — and that until you step away, or they cast you out, you can’t see nothin’ clearly. Truth is, being on the outside is a blessing. Naw, it’s a necessity, if you got any creative spark at all. You know Husserl’s epoché, what that does? No”—he squinted at me—“you probably don’t. And that’s too bad, ’cause the way I see it, the problem with all the fuckin’ anointed and somebody like Abel — his name, according to Philo, means ‘one who refers all things to God’—is that they’re sheep. That’s right, part of the obedient, tamed, psalm-singing herd. They make me sick, every one of ’em. See, I ain’t never been good at group-think. You ever notice how safe and dull and correct they all are? How timid! And unoriginal? How vulgar and materialistic? Call ’em what you want, Christians or Communists or Cultural Nationalists, but I call ’em sheep. Or zombies — that’s what Malcolm X called the Nation of Islam, you know, after he broke away from Elijah, his surrogate daddy. There’s not a real individual in the bunch. No risk-takers, Bishop. No iconoclasts. Nobody who thinks the unthinkable, or is cursed (or blessed) with bearing the cross of a unique, singular identity … except for him.” He paused, kneading his lower lip between his forefinger and thumb; he was thinking, I guessed, of the minister. “Individuality … That scares ’em. In Japan, they got a saying: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. You see what I’m saying? What’s the goal after integration? Shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue? Is that what so many civil rights workers died for? Me, I ain’t studyin’ ’bout integrating with no run-of-the-mill white folks, or black ones either. But that’s how you get to belong, boy — by fitting in and mumbling the party line and keeping your head down and losing your soul, but I think I can save you from that if you let me.”

I couldn’t believe he was saying these things; I wondered if he meant them (which I couldn’t believe) or if he was playing with me simply to see what I’d say. I mean, the minister had instructed me to help him. At that moment I couldn’t see him as mad. No, I saw him as wicked. Yet he made me recall the minister’s sermon “Transformed Nonconformist,” wherein he railed against the “mass mind,” the cowardice of the herd, and proclaimed, “Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.”

I said, “Who are you?”

“I dunno,” Smith replied. “I’m always findin’ that out. I guess I make it up as I go along. Pull off there, I got to pee.”

I flicked the turn signal and coasted the car off the highway toward a tiny, two-pump station and diner that must have dated back to the Depression. A low, barrel-roofed building, it squatted in the shadow of an abandoned red-brick warehouse. The sign blazoned in black letters across its front said PIT STOP. The exterior, faded green and yellow, looked weathered and washed out in the bright midday sunlight. Taped to one of the diner’s cloudy windows was a cardboard sign announcing the day’s special (DELUXE STEAK SANDWICH—$1.75) beside a campaign poster promoting a Republican candidate for the state senate.

“Matthew,” said Amy, starting to wake, “why’re we stopping here?”

“I gotta piss,” said Smith, “and I’m hungry.”

Squinting at the Pit Stop, knuckling both her eyes, she said, “I think I’ll wait in the car.”

Smith stepped out, gravel crunching under his shoe. Every ancient warning signal in my head from childhood told me to stay in the car. But I was hungry too. Parked off to one side of the diner was a rust-eaten pickup truck with a gun rack, an English setter tied in the bed, and a GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT sticker on the rear bumper. The dog started barking the moment I shut off the engine, which rattled for a while, then coughed and finally stuttered to a stop.

I stepped from the Chevelle into a hot shower of sunlight and moved, stiff-rumped and sore, through blistering air toward the door. My heart drew tight. I slowed my step, and stopped Smith at the door.

“Chaym … I think we should go somewhere else.”

He arched his back, stretching. “What’s the matter? You afraid they won’t serve us? You go somewhere else. I’m starvin’, and I know my rights.”

He stepped inside, his head rammed forward, and I followed, my eyes taking only a moment to adjust to the dark, low-ceilinged interior. I began a prayer but the words did not come. The air inside the diner was soured by the smell of grease. Over the stove the ceiling was smoke-grimed, and beneath our feet the once-brown linoleum was scuffed and faded. Five small booths, darkened by use, ran the length of the diner on my right. Slut’s wool had been swept into the corners. A portable fan blew hot air across a long, curving counter. There, an old man, thin and balding and wearing round black-rimmed bifocals clamped over the bulb of his waxy nose, sat on a leather stool, reading an edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that headlined the riot in Chicago. His fingernails were dark with dirt, his chin seemed to drop straight into his neck, the back of which was hacked and leathery, and his overalls hung loose in the crotch. On the other side of the counter a middle-aged woman shaped like the Venus of Willendorf, with hazel eyes in a flat, pale face enveloped by red-blond hair, was topping off his cup with black coffee. The name stitched over the pocket of her stained uniform read ARLENE. When Smith entered they both stopped suddenly and stared. Just stared, as if he and I were spacemen who’d fallen from the stars.

“You bet’ be open for business now,’ said Smith. “We come a long way …”

Arlene’s head made an infinitesimal bob, but she was still pouring steaming hot coffee — beyond the rim of the old man’s cup and along the porcelain counter, where it spilled onto his narrow lap and squeezed a whoop out of him that so startled her the pot fell clattering from her fingers to the floor. She scrambled to clean up the mess. Smith made a nasty chuckle, relishing every moment of confusion our appearance had caused.

“You hear what I said?” he asked. “Can we get served?”

Arlene was still staring. “I guess I can wait on you.” She had one of those roosterish, unmusical American voices, coarsened by years of smoking Camel straights, full of cracks and cackle. “The owner, he’s not here. Are you …”

“Am I what?”

She pointed toward the newspaper in front of the old man, who was swabbing his wet crotch with a fistful of napkins, to a front-page, above-the-crease photograph of King in a Chicago poolroom surrounded by admiring teenagers as he leaned over the green felt of a pool table, lining up the cue for his shot. Arlene said, “Him. Is that you?”

“No.” Abruptly, he was very quiet.

“Really? You look just like him.”

“I’m not him,” Smith said angrily, and the saying of it seemed to knock the wind out of him, as if he’d been asked that a thousand times, and each time whoever asked was disappointed, making him feel like an impostor, less than the real McCoy. He lifted one of the leather-bound menus stacked on the counter next to displays of candy and fresh pies, and studied it as the old man, dripping, scurried out. Arlene continued to gawk at us.

“I want four specials for me’n my friends, to go. You got a bathroom here?”

“Outside, around the back. You know, I almost asked for your autograph—”

“You still want it?”

“Well, if you were him, I might, but—”

Smith walked out before she finished.

Arlene blinked, pushing a limp, lawless lock of hair, dampened by the heat, off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” I said, “he’s just sensitive about his looks.”

“Well, the way he left, you’d think I called him a name. He does look like that colored preacher, the one causin’ all the big to-do up in Chicago. I wanted his autograph ’cause he’s in the paper all the time, but that don’t mean I like how he’s stirrin’ things up. I get along with colored just fine, but that Dr. Coon—”

“King,” My stomach heaved. “His name is King.”

“Whatever, I just think he’s pushin’ things too fast.” She took a deep breath. “You go ’head and sit down. I can serve you since you’re gonna take it out. I’ll have your order in a minute.”

She stepped to the freezer, took out four hamburger patties that looked as if they’d just thrown off a lingering illness, and dropped them into a skillet on the grill. My belly was still knotted. I’d wanted to slap her, but I remembered how my mother told me to behave in public, and how polite and civilized and patient the minister was himself — always a credit to the race — when confronting white people with an I.Q. the size of their shoes. I tried not to hate her. At the spot where she’d been leaning on the counter when we entered there was a copy of a movie star magazine beside a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray packed with butts bearing the imprint of incisors I’d noticed were stained brown by nicotine when she opened her mouth. In fact, she’d tried to keep her hand over her mouth when speaking to conceal an overbite and the tartar and decay on her front teeth. With her back to the counter, I could see a blemish on her neck from cheap, dimestore jewelry.

I closed my eyes, both hands resting on my lap. Smith’s words in the car ran through my head, then the memory of trips my mother and I made to visit relatives in South Carolina when I was young fell through my heart like rain. I remembered roadside cafés like this diner, where we stopped hungry and tired after seven hours of driving and were told we could be served only if we went to the back entrance. Another image rose up: badly lit department stores near my relatives’ homes in Abbeville where they enjoyed the privilege of purchasing clothes like other citizens from the pale, blond salesgirls but could not try them on their bodies before the sale was made, as if their skin was unclean, corrupt in some way, and might contaminate or blemish with the ancient stain of blackness these cheap garments off the rack. All this my mother accepted, and she never corrected the teenage employees when they called her “girl,” which even then made my thoughts turn murderous with hate and humiliation, as an incident King experienced in 1944 brought him “perilous close” to despising white people when during his college days he was seated behind a curtain on a dining car, a shade pulled down to obliterate entirely the offensiveness of his presence. And so he rode behind a screen, trapped within their ideas of his identity, his blood pressure soaring, which meant even his health and the risk of myocardial infarction was at the mercy of people he despised, and he could do no more to change this than my mother who, dragging me in tow, tramped through mud around the café to the kitchen door, where we waited for what seemed hours, listening to the laughter and voices of customers and the clatter of dishes and silverware inside. I remembered that my mother’s expression was sad but stoic as she looked into the distance with her chin lifted, both hands folded in front of her, and I saw that for me she would suffer a thousand indignities and denials of her personhood so that I would not go hungry, dying this way every day, one little piece at a time, in order to wrest from the world not great victories but the most pathetically simple items for survival — hand-me-down clothes from the women whose houses she cleaned and the plate of food wrapped in foil the café’s waitress at last brought to us, handing it to my mother with a self-satisfied smile as if she’d done something good and noble that day, a compassionate deed her pastor would praise come Sunday, because she had not turned us away but instead fed the coloreds, the grendels, through the back door, not cast us out as some would, which was unchristian, but consigned us to a more benign phantom realm east of Eden where we were, if not fully human, half-men and half-women: poor, damned creatures scratching at her kitchen door like cats for a bowl of milk. (Wasn’t that how JFK had once described blacks, as “poor bastards”?) And for this meal, this phantom nourishment, my mother gave her money, said God bless you—I remember her blessing them — then back inside her car as we continued south she made me eat every morsel for which she had so dearly paid.

Arlene placed our food on the counter, her lips compressed, as Smith came back from the bathroom, and rang up the bill. “That’s four dollars and fifty cents.”

I handed her a five-dollar bill. She placed it in the cash register, then scooped out my change. I thrust my palm toward her for the coins, and had perfect control of myself, the magnanimity and external calm my mother had insisted upon, and which the Movement’s leaders so nobly embodied, until she slapped the money on the counter, and something inside me (I don’t know what) snapped (I don’t know how), flooding me with a hatred so hot, like a drug, I was nearly blinded by it as I threw the food in her face, hurled from the counter sugar canisters and ketchup bottles smashing against the wall behind the grill, screaming so loud and long my glasses steamed; then, as Arlene fled toward the rear of the diner, I stormed outside to the car, Smith right at my heels.

He was grinning. “Very nice. You were vicious, Bishop. I think your best line was calling her an insignificant, execrable bitch mired in the booboisie — that’s from Mencken, right?”

“I said that?”

“Oh, yeah,” he cackled. “And more. You left her toasted, roasted, and with an apple in her mouth. It was choice. You sounded like William F. Buckley on bad acid. I always knew it’d be sweet to see a black intellectual go ballistic.”

I was shaking too badly to drive. And I felt ashamed, as if I’d failed the minister, my mother, myself. I gave Smith my keys — his smile mashed his cheeks up in parallel moons — and within a few minutes we were back on the highway, heading farther south. For the longest time I sat with my hands squeezed between my knees, my fists clenched, afraid that at any moment I’d see in the rearview mirror a highway patrol car pulling up behind us, yet I felt exhilarated by what I’d done.

Smith kept grinning at me, happily patting out rhythms on the steering wheel with his palms. “You all right.” He reached over and patted my shoulder. “With a li’l more work, you gonna love it where I live.”