Dreamer

4

There were many times when he wondered if he was wrong.

Sitting by the window in the second row of first-class seats, all the others empty at this hour, on the predawn flight that shuttled him back and forth between Chicago and Atlanta, where he was determined to earn his $6,000-a-year salary by delivering a sermon each Sunday, he thought back to the astonishing victories granted him by the Lord of Love, and forward to the November retreat planned for his staff at which time he felt he should remind them how he was still searching and did not have all the answers. Nonviolence, he felt, was an experiment with truth. It was a truth-seeking process. That was all in this world he could say with certainty …

It was four-thirty in the morning. The engines of the airplane roared around him as it tore down the runway, shaking loose poorly secured doors on the overhead compartments and, behind him, throwing dishes to the floor in the tiny cubicle that served as a galley. That so much metal could even leave the ground and stay airborne always startled and delighted him (and in single-engine planes, in which he refused to ride, terrified him). Airplanes piqued his anagogic and analogical side, the old student of Aquinas who enjoyed reasoning vertically from the natural world toward heaven, which these flying machines came close to bumping into. Unconsciously he pressed his feet forward under the seat in front of him to keep his small black suitcase from sliding into the aisle, though if it spilled open there would be little to retrieve because he felt best when he traveled light with as little baggage as possible, physical and metaphysical. Toward the front of the plane, beneath the red FASTEN SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING signs, the black stewardess who’d brought coffee and a pillow and fussed over him when he boarded was strapping herself into a bucket seat that folded out of the wall. She’d told him her name was Stephanie. An Alabaman raised to value the goodwill and hospitality that was so much a part of his own upbringing, she’d asked for his autograph and couldn’t do enough for him. Apparently, she’d seen his name on the passenger list, then rushed out and purchased forty copies of Stride Toward Freedom, inserting in each one the inscription she wanted him to write for her family and friends. “I hope you won’t mind,” she’d said. He saw the cardboard box of books at her feet, and sighed. All he wanted to do was work on his sermon and nap before they arrived in Atlanta. She couldn’t know how sensitive he was about people fawning over him, or how every worldly honor he received (he had more medals than a Russian general) threw him into the deepest reflection on whether he deserved these distinctions and if one day they’d prove to be more weight than they were worth. Glorifying any man was a sin. But he accepted the honors so as not to offend. People sent him photos of their newborns named after him, their wedding snapshots, and constantly wrote him requests for his autographed portrait. Always he or someone on his staff responded. After his trip to India he’d vowed to set aside one day a week for fasting and meditation, and to spend more time in study — he was certain he needed these things to be a better leader. Yet there never seemed to be enough time to keep those vows … Their eyes caught across the cabin. Stephanie was smiling at him again, then she winked and looked back at the clipboard on her lap.

Suddenly he felt warm. With two fingers he pulled loose the tight knot of his tie, undid the top button on his shirt, then pushed up the window’s stiff curtain at his right, peering down at blinking lights on the plane’s silvery deltoid wing, and beyond that to the waters of Lake Michigan. The sun, huge and liquid, hung over the horizon. From this height waves wimpling the blue surface looked frozen, as if someone had called time out on all motion in the world below, and the Wheel of Life stopped to give everyone time to catch his breath. And then he could see nothing as the plane began its steep ascent to thirty-five thousand feet — he only knew they were rising to that altitude because the pilot, a southerner by his accent, came on over the crackling loudspeaker to tell passengers his flight plan and the temperature in Atlanta and to report that their crew had a combined total of fifty thousand hours in the air. Somehow the pilot’s voice and experience put him at ease. Or maybe it was the vulnerability he felt whenever he flew, knowing that someone he couldn’t see or talk to had control over his destination and whether he lived or died, and most likely that person was trustworthy since his own life depended on doing his job well. It wasn’t easy to be an atheist on an airplane. No sooner had you strapped in than you had to believe in something beyond yourself. Perhaps there was a sermon here, an exemplum he might use on Sunday. But no, afterward someone would pick it apart, like the monk Gaunilo shredding Anselm’s proof for God’s existence. It was too whimsical. Yet in a small way it reminded him of that terrible night in Montgomery when his faith, lukewarm since childhood, became real.

Everyone in Atlanta expected the son of the city’s most influential pastor would be eager to join the church. The truth was that when he was seven, doing so was the farthest thing from his mind. But during Ebenezer’s annual two-week revival in May of 1936, his sister boldly stepped forward for baptism, and this stung him sorely, the thought that Christine might get a leg up on him in anything. Halfheartedly he submitted to the ritual. But even then some critical, questioning part of him stood back, skeptical, watching himself from a distance, and mocking him a little because not only had the “crisis moment” associated with conversion eluded him but he could not square the over-the-top emotionalism of the fundamentalist Baptist church — talking in tongues and flailing on the floor when “getting happy”—with his preference for coolly and deliberately thinking things through.

Sometimes he felt at odds with others at Ebenezer. His Sunday-school teachers had little education to speak of. Nevertheless, they believed. Although none had heard of biblical hermeneutics, each old deacon and assistant pastor had been saved in that revered and awful (to him) moment of epilepsy and seizure so many said lay in wait one day for him. He told no one how that prediction cut him off at the knees after he saw a light-skinned girl from Booker T. Washington High School, one he’d been attracted to, struck down by the spirit in his father’s church. Lightning seemed to single her out from the other parishioners fanning themselves and singing one of his favorite hymns, “Honor, Honor”—she was adance in the seat beside her startled mother, then it lifted her like a broken doll and flung her helplessly to the hard wooden floor. Her eyes turned up in her head. Veins in her throat stood out. There was the possibility she might swallow her tongue, and that frightened him all the more and made his heart leap in his chest. He watched her wide-eyed, squeezing his hands together, as she kicked the air and tore loose her clothing, as unconscious of her nakedness as someone in one of the ancient, pre-Christian mystery cults. For months she’d ignored him. She’d been haughty, distant, in control. Now she writhed on the floor like a worm. Water ran down her legs. Her light cotton dress rose above her brown thighs, giving him an eyeful of what he’d fantasized about all summer long before the girl’s mother shoved her garments down. His own mother spun him back around in his seat. Watching the girl had aroused him. Biting down hard on his knuckles, he felt burning shame shot through with the wound of desire. Spiritual hunger and sexual longing simultaneously. He closed his eyes, praying that his voyeurism, like that of Ham, had not offended the god thunderously unleashed inside the girl, yet if this violent seizure was what it meant to be saved, he hoped it would never happen to him.

He wondered if his faith was weak, if perhaps he was the worst of sinners and hypocrites. Others, he felt, suspected this too when at thirteen he shocked his teacher and classmates by rejecting the idea of Christ’s bodily resurrection from the sepulcher. He questioned, he doubted the Bible’s literal interpretation all through his teens, and wondered if the Negro church would ever be more Apollonian, as intellectually respectable as it was Dionysian and emotionally intense. The conflict between the intellect and emotional fervor, between the head (gnosis) and the heart (pistis), only deepened as he grew older. It held him back from following in his father’s footsteps. Medicine or law, he thought, might suit him better than churches that often seemed so otherworldly they were no earthly good at all. Preparing men for heaven was all well and good. But, he wondered, what of their conditions in the here and now? Then at Morehouse his liberal professors George D. Kelsey and Benjamin Mays gave him scholarly models for the kind of minister he one day hoped to be, filling his head with literature and philosophy, but even a jackleg preacher incapable of writing his own name had direct knowledge of the peace that passeth understanding he had only experienced in books.

During the Montgomery campaign, that ended. Threats on his life and those of Coretta and Yolanda, whom he saw too seldom at the height of the bus boycott, were nothing new. But one call shook him. It caught him, this newly minted Ph.D. whose future seemed so bright before the boycott’s leadership was thrust upon him, one weary night when he came home feeling euchred and afraid his family might be snatched away. His wife was waiting by the telephone. She handed it to him. “Listen, nigger,” the gin-soaked voice said, “we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery. If you aren’t out of this town in three days we’re gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house.”

He knew he could not go on. The forces gathered against him were too many and great. Out there in the night someone was loading a 20-gauge pump-action shotgun to hunt him down; pouring gasoline into a glass jug to blow the limbs off his baby. They might be with the police. Or the military. Or Negroes displeased with all he’d stirred up. He could turn to no one for help. Not the Montgomery police, the politicians in Washington, or his parents. No one. Here, the roots of segregation ran deep, fueled by poverty. The seventy thousand whites on the average earned $1,730 yearly, the fifty thousand Negroes $970. Fewer than two thousand of the voting-age Negroes were registered, and humiliating obstacles were placed in their way. In Montgomery no Negroes held public office. The uneducated were apathetic, resigned to second-class status. The learned, especially if they belonged to any of the black civic groups, were factionalized and fought more often than they agreed.

For a long time that night he walked the floor, thinking of Revelations 22:15, his head tipped, both hands clenched into fists, his stomach turned to lead, searching for some way to escape his duties on the Montgomery Improvement Association without looking like a coward or a fool. Once his foot struck the leg of a table and brought a lamp and a photo of the baby bouncing onto the carpet. He swore under his breath and undid the mess he’d made. His directionless pacing brought him into the kitchen — he could do less damage there. In order to find something to do with his trembling hands, he put a fresh pot of coffee on the stove, silently watched it brew, then slumped down with his cup at the kitchen table. Coretta was rooms away, caring for the baby. He rubbed his face with both hands. He began to heave for breath, knowing if he failed in this fight against evil, surely the others who’d sacrificed so much would falter as well. His name would be struck from the Book of Life; the boycott would unravel and nothing would have been accomplished. They would be worse off than before. Demoralized, defeated. But in heaven’s name, what man could continue under this weight? He felt caged. Chained. In bondage and no longer belonging to himself. How had Boston University’s rising star come to this cul-de-sac? From childhood and the days his father talked politics at the dinner table, he’d dreamed of uplifting the Race, studied and prepared himself for this great task, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith only to discover, too late, that nobody — or so he feared — gave a goddamn about his bourgeois sacrifices. If Yolanda and Coretta were killed, who would care? If there was no God, as so many thinkers claimed, he was a fool for endangering his family. Love was the ontological foundation of values. God was love. It followed that without Him there could be no basis for all his appeals to justice from the pulpit. No reason for anyone to care about the poor. No argument, in the end, to counter slavery itself, for in a materialistic, mechanistic world, a neutral universe onto which man projected his delusions of freedom and inherent worth, no value claims could be made at all — the cosmos would be irrational, not benign, indifferent to order and measure, a nightmare in the mind of some devil who could not roll himself awake. Thus far Montgomery had shown him that if God was not dead, He must certainly be deaf to His people’s suffering.

His fingers tightened round his empty cup until it shattered, obliterating inside and out. He took a deep breath. In resistance to oppression, he realized, there was fear of reprisals, in acquiescence the annihilation of self-worth, in fame the fear of humiliation, in strength the fear of enemies, in social stature the fear of slander, in health the fear of illness, in beauty the fear of old age, in scholarship the fear of disputants, in living … the certainty of death. His thoughts churned on, complicated, exotic. He felt too tired to move, but his mind, from surface to seabed, kept whirring widdershins.

At last he began to pray. To whom — or what — he could not say. Not asking for anything then. Not fighting, only confessing, “Lord, I have nothing left …” His gaze drifted to the fragments of the cup that was no longer a cup. But where had the “cup” gone? His fist opened, disappearing into his hand. Where had his “fist” gone? Then it came quietly, unbidden. He was traveling light again, for the long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, the very belief in an “I” that suffered and strained to affect the world, dissolved, and for the first time he felt like a dreamer gently roused from sleep and forgetfulness. Awake, he saw he was not the doer. How could he have ever believed otherwise? That which he’d thought practiced virtue, surrendered to vice, held degrees, opinions and elaborated theories, and traveled toward a goal was spun from a spiderweb of words, no more real than the cantels of the erstwhile cup before him. Later, he would tell reporters and his congregation the room was rayed with shadowless light, and the Lord said unto him, Stand up for righteousness, stand up for the truth, and God will be at your side forever, but in fact the light came from him — not without — and the vox Dei he heard had been his own. Not I, he heard it whisper again in the suddenly transparent kitchen, but the Father within me doeth the works … I seek not my will but the will of the Father who sent me …

The stewardess’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “The captain has turned off the seat-belt sign. You are free to walk around the cabin if you wish.”

He struggled with the seat belt cutting into his belly and made a note to himself to push back a little earlier from banquet tables in the future. Finally the buckle sprang open, and he brought down the tray tucked into the seat in front of him. From his briefcase he removed the unfinished pages of his sermon and spread them before him, still thinking of his “Kitchen Conversion.” He’d not experienced anything quite like it thereafter. Now it was a faint memory, like first love, but he knew enough to trust the Lord to remove any obstacles — himself included — placed in the way of his ministry. Needless to say, that perplexed most of his aides, the purely political ones. Again and again they told him letting God handle little details was fine at Ebenezer but if he hoped to stay at the forefront of the Movement he damned well needed to organize his campaigns better Perhaps Chicago was proving them right. There were factors he had not foreseen. Down South the lives of whites and blacks were impeached to such a degree that bloodlines and surnames were shared. Like it or not, they were one people created in the cauldron of the Peculiar Institution. There was nothing uncommon about white babies nursing at the breasts of a black housekeeper. White politicians had a Negro (and most likely an Indian) hiding somewhere back in their family tree. If you went back to A.D. 700, everyone on earth had a common ancestor; no two persons, regardless of their race, could be less closely related than fiftieth cousins. Each man and woman on the planet today was a direct descendant of Jesus, Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, Tutankhamen, and Judas Iscariot. And, oh, interrelatedness went farther than even that. Each of the twenty thousand breaths we drew each day contained a quadrillion atoms breathed by the rest of humanity within the past week, and one’s next breath brimmed with more than a million atoms that once swirled within the chests of Anaximander, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Vivekananda, and the Aborigines of Australia. Given that ground of overlapping lives one could hope that once the artificial, legal barriers to integration were removed, the children of masters and slaves might recognize that Race was an illusion, all children were literally — genetically — their own, and embrace one another as members of a single tribe.

Yes, he knew the South. The North, of course, was another matter. Northern cities, he was ready to believe, were, as the Book of Genesis claimed, the products of Cain. Mercifully, they were behind him for another weekend.

And now the stewardess was moving his way, struggling with the editions it would take him over an hour to individually sign for her loved ones. Joints in his fingers would throb, he’d have to soak his hand later in a pan of hot water, as he often did after standing in receiving lines and pressing the flesh with thousands of admirers. And that was just all right. As Abu Sa‘id, an Islamic scholar he admired, might put it, there was nothing inside the blue coat and skirt Stephanie was wearing except Allah.