Dreamer

6

At the SCLC part of my job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity — particularly what took place in the interstices. Naturally, this is where the stories of all doubles occur. In a spiral notebook, one I kept from my college days, I made entries on Chaym Smith’s progress, having no idea at the time that just possibly I was composing a gospel. I — even I — was startled to discover how much he’d already absorbed about King since 1954, as a man might meticulously study his rival, or an object of love, or — in his case — someone he loved and envied simultaneously. He was determined to possess the mystery of the minister’s power and popularity, to make it his own. In the days following our arrival at the Nest, one flowing into the next in a round-the-clock ribbon of dress rehearsals for the role Smith was set on playing, we three were subtly transformed, Amy no less than I as we looked to impress the matrix of the minister Unto our charge.

Of course, he began with the Bible, rereading his heavily underlined New Testament in a marathon review that began Friday late and lasted well into the following Monday His capacity for sustained, one-pointed concentration was uncanny, a skill — that of dharana—he’d acquired during his year at the temple in Kyoto. He highlighted in red every statement by Jesus, who most certainly was known as “Joshua” in his own time and possibly was a member of the Essenes, a Jewish monastic order influenced by Hinduism. Around the farmhouse Smith had Amy pin photographs of everyone important in King’s life and sheets of paper containing the scriptural citations most often encountered in his sermons. These he committed to memory, sometimes through rote repetition, sometimes through mnemonic devices that allowed him to absorb whole speeches, provided he could call up the pictorial “pegs” on which key phrases and ideas had been placed. Soon enough it became clear that as Smith immersed himself in the first thirty-seven years of King’s journey, he was entering a portal that, far from stopping at the borders of the black world or the Baptist faith, exploded outward into what King himself once called, in a phrase far more revealing of himself than he knew, the “inescapable network of mutuality.”

He sent me to the state college over in Carbondale, where I photocopied the available sermons by preachers who’d influenced King’s oratorical style. This took a full day, and led to the startling (for me) and exhilarating (for Smith) discovery that many of the minister’s most famous speeches were tissues of pirated material from nearly three dozen theologians and popular (white) American preachers from the ’4os and ’5os, their ideas and idioms, voices and vocabularies, so blended with his own blistering denunciations of bigotry that, once I brought these documents back to the Nest, we found it impossible to demarcate where the minds (and the archaeology of that most ancient of objects, the self) of Harry Emerson Fosdick, C. L. Franklin, and Robert McCracken ended and King’s properly commenced. In his sermons he was, in essence, not one man but an integrated Crowd, containing here a smidgen of Walter Rauschenbusch, there a bit of Gerald Kennedy, and everywhere the imposing influence of his father. In effect, the minister riffed (not unlike Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington) on the entire, two-millennia-old history of Christendom, blending its best and making that his own in a stunningly Yankee amalgam.

Smith found this discovery of some of King’s sources, his borrowings, gratifying. Gleefully so. “You know, I always figured he couldn’t be as smart as he seems,” Smith said, yet I doubted he believed that. He was looking for faults, anything to reduce the minister’s stature and give himself room to breathe. But I wondered, as we examined King’s intellectual genesis and his Elizabethan borrowings, if the self we constructed was anything more than a fragile composite of other selves we’d encountered — a kind of epistemological salad — indebted to all spoken languages, all evolutionary forms, all lives that preceded our own, so that, when we spoke, it could be said, in the final analysis, subjectivity vanished and the world sang in every sentence we uttered. (And thus narrative was not a lie.) Added to that, and perhaps strangest of all, I noticed that as Smith pored over King’s speeches he at first resisted statements that contradicted his own experience of things — for example, the minister saying, “It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting heredity and environmental circumstances.” In learning, there was an inescapable moment of alienation and displacement, a plunge into uncertainty and insecurity in the new, the other; but then, miraculously, as he relaxed from resisting the revolution possible with each new perception, that interval of disorientation passed, and he found that no matter how far his mind had traveled, or how alien the data of knowledge might have seemed at first, he had in the end through these studies encountered only a dimension of himself.

After I worked with Smith all morning and afternoon on the broad themes and tropes in the ministers speeches, and the four levels of meaning in the Bible (literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogic), and helped him design for himself a daily program of lectio divina, stretching the envelope of his mind and imagination, he enlisted Amy to work on his body. He knew, of course, exactly what he wanted from us. At the temple, Smith said, he’d learned to read Sanskrit in three days of study and chanting sutras. He asked Amy, who’d been a drama student, to help him with exercises to control the vocal centers — the abdomen, chest, lower and upper throat, and sinus cavity. He had me give him a close-to-the-skull haircut.

Then he proceeded to study, for fifty-minute intervals (as monks do with mandalas), and with all his senses imaginatively put into play, color photographs of Kings birth home (sold to Rev. Williams in 1909 for the price of $3,500) at 501 Auburn Avenue N.E. in Atlanta. With these pictures spread out before him on the farmhouse floor, he imaginatively climbed the four steps to the door and worked to feel everything in the images, bringing forth an emotional association for the umbrella box, high-backed chair, and table with a bouquet of flowers in the entryway; feel his way past the sliding doors to the piano with its low bench, which had one wobbly leg, the fireplace, the rocker, and different games — Old Maid and Monopoly — the King children played beside the old-fashioned radio in the parlor; feel himself walking the hardwood floors from the parlor to the tiny first-floor bathroom where Martin as a boy hid from his father’s switch and to avoid the unmanly chore of doing the dishes (he preferred to haul coal for the furnace to the cramped, low-ceilinged basement); he moved on to the kitchen with its Hossier cabinets and icebox containing a frozen block weighing ten pounds. From the kitchen window he worked to see the vacant lot the King children often played in and where once a year the circus, featuring clowns and acrobats and sweet cones of colored ice, threw up its tents. He ascended to the second floor, where he could view from the stairhead, one hand resting on the smooth railing, the window Martin used to leap from to impress girls passing by, and at age twelve hurled himself from with suicidal intent after hearing of “Mama” Jennie Williams’s fatal heart attack in 1941 when he had sneaked away to sin by going to the circus. He let his gaze travel to the guestroom (far left) set aside by King Senior for the endless stream of visiting ministers who stayed at their home; then on to his grandmother’s bedroom (there Martin was born), and next to that the boy’s playroom, where Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, coloring books, and Chinese checkers were scattered along the floor, and to feel too the height of the second-floor ceiling which Daddy King, who was only five-six, touched with his fingertips when he learned of Martin’s birth and literally jumped for joy. (Martin, we informed Smith, was originally named Michael King Jr. after his father, who was also christened Michael and then later, like his son, replaced that name with Martin.) We could see that this exercise was excruciating for Chaym Smith. He’d lived in an orphanage. On the streets. Each detail in the photos reinforced for him the staggering inequities of personal fortune. Little wonder that King leaned more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature. Toward the end of this session, as Smith came back downstairs and out to the front porch, giving himself a clear image of the German store down the street, owned by the father of Martin’s two best friends, and just across the street, over the neatly trimmed shrubs in the Kings’ yard, the shotgun shacks and alley apartments housing the black poor only fifty feet from Daddy King’s front door — at the end, Smith was shaken. He said, “I woulda given anything for a loving, decent childhood like that. Parents like that.” He peered up to me, but his eyes were still filled with all he’d seen. “Bishop, it ain’t right not having anybody who cared …”

Amy thought it best to put the photos away.

That night he slept longer than usual, his dreams peopled with King family principals. Loving folk such as Smith himself had never known. We did not wake him. He stumbled from his bedroom a little before noon, still bitter, but said, “What’re y’all staring at me for? Let’s get to work.” In Chicago, King had given us several articles of his clothing: pointed black shoes, a shirt from Zimmerman’s in Atlanta, black shin-high nylon socks, a brown passport holder bearing the inscription CITY OF LONDON, HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT, and Ruskin’s book Unto This Last. These I gave to Smith. The clothing was a near-perfect fit. After a light lunch, he turned to copying lines from one of King’s recorded speeches, “A Knock at Midnight,” isolating the metaphoric logic behind the comparisons King drew, some of which Smith found severely wanting in poetic value (“the cataract of sin,” “the virus of pride”); he sneered, “I can do better than that,” then plunged on to scan passages (“Not only is it midnight in man’s collective life but it’s midnight in his individual life, it’s midnight in the psychological order …”) so his emphasis would vary as little as possible from the original.

To his credit and our incredulity, he absorbed the information we fed him like a sponge. But then again, the task was not as daunting as it might seem, given his long, painful twelve-year obsession with the nation’s most prominent preacher, and his own unusual gifts. Little by little, he learned that if there was a single philosophical law to the minister’s life, an essence, it was embodied in three profound ideals. First, the deeper meaning of nonviolence, not merely as a strategy for protest, but as a Way, a daily praxis men must strive to translate into each and every one of their deeds. This Smith understood and compared to the Sanskrit word ahimsa, from himsa (“to injure”) and a (“no” or “not”), so that in its fullness King’s moral stance implied noninjury to everything that exists. Second, agape, the ability to love something not for what it presently was (which might be quite unlovable, like George Wallace) but for what it could be, a teleological love that recognized everything as process, not product, and saw beneath the surface to a thing’s potentiality. And last, the fact of integration as the life’s blood of Being itself. As I explained this to Smith, it struck me that these were not separate ideals at all, only different sides of a single meditation nearly as old as humanity, a meditation that could be lapped and folded in as few as three words:

Others first.

Always.

That was the vision; everything else was mere detail. (Though the Devil, as always, was in the details.)

Nights, when he slept, crashing into unconsciousness, Smith placed close by his mattress a tape recorder that all night long softly played Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, “Moonlight” Sonata, Mahalia Jackson, and compositions by Harry T. Burleigh. Awakening the next day at 5 A.M., his eyes puffy, he put aside his razor, substituting for it the distinctly black ritual of shaving with the smelly depilatory powder (“Magic”) used by the minister and, if truth be told, millions of black men with sensitive skin. It lit up the farmhouse with a smell like sulfur or eggs gone south after he mixed it with cold water, spread it on his face with a spatula, let it harden for five minutes, then scraped it off. But it wasn’t enough for Smith to shave like King; he elected to eat as he did too, having Amy fix meals of the minister’s favorite dishes — turnip greens, bacon drippings, and cornbread (food, King once confessed, was his greatest sin). I helped in the kitchen, reading to Amy from Mama Pearl’s recipes, and shared with her the chore of washing (me) and drying (Amy) her family’s plates, silverware, and pots after dinner. But no, I did not approach her again with my affections. I was even careful, when handing her a plate for drying, to keep two feet of distance between us, and I was at pains not to bump into her or touch her without her permission, or look at her for too long, or do anything that would make her uncomfortable or remember how clumsily I’d cast my heart at her feet only to have her step around it like roadkill.

No doubt my behavior baffled her (which was nothing new). Like so many in the Movement, Amy was strong, serious, sure of herself and what things meant in the world. She was an Abelite, lost to ambiguity. I cannot lie; I loved her still. I’d believed that as Aquinas, that intractable Aristotelian, put it, a pious woman might lead a man to the Lord. Saint John of the Cross said it just as well, amado con amada. She might be his salvation, if he wedded his will to hers. (Clearly, this worked for King’s father.) But I knew my love would never be returned. This asymmetry was not entirely unsatisfying. Because of Smith, I began to accept the sad inevitability of myself. With not being able to take sides (when one’s choices were miserable). With the mark of loneliness, ipseity, Socratic doubts, interiority, and always having an afterthought. I felt at ease with (and less apologetic for) my bookishness, my inclination toward irony, and my sense that the world as it was, was unacceptable; I’d settled on the fact that perhaps I lived best as a witness who withdrew and gained distance in order to become truly engaged. Still, I recognized something I loved in the community of the certain, the blessed, but thanks to Smith I hankered for it a little less than before and knew that whatever liberation I might look forward to was in my hands alone.

And there is also this to say:

I began to fear we were being watched. Although I said nothing to the others, late some nights a plain green Plymouth rolled up the road toward the farmhouse. Its headlights were off. The driver sat for long minutes, and I saw smoke spiraling up through one side window. We were miles from town; I wondered: Who would come this far? Whenever I rose from bed and ran barefoot to the road, the Plymouth’s engine started, and the car was gone before I got there, nothing remaining of its presence except tire marks and black dottle from someone’s pipe.

As I said, I did not want to frighten the others. Instead, I asked Smith to walk with me, just to get him away from his regimen of reading, to Giant City State Park, through the enclosure known as the Stone Fort, which once served as a site for Indian ceremonial purposes at the top of an eightyfoot stone cliff. As we walked I tried to convey capsule descriptions of existentialist theologians germane to the minister’s intellectual genesis, and what little I’d gleaned from a hasty perusal of Edgar Brightman. Of Personalism there was precious little to say. Had King not written about its value to him in reinforcing his belief in a loving, divine Father on high when he was in college (in contrast to Paul Tillich’s monistic, impersonal God as the “Ground of Being”), Personalism as a philosophy would be as dead as Neoplatonism. None of the abstract portraits of the Lord offered by Tillich, Plotinus, Spinoza, or Eastern mystics could satisfy a Baptist preacher’s boy. Thus the Boston Personalists, and Crozer professor L. Harold DeWolf’s conception of a self-limited, temporal Father who bore man’s face and flaws, hopes and values, impacted on Kings vision more than any other; if Martin imagined the Lord, the odds were good that He looked (and behaved) more than a little like Daddy King. For DeWolf, God was immersed in creation, His power willingly curtailed by human freedom. He was not a prescient deity. His holiness was entangled in the bloody advance of history. Future events unfolding in this intentionally less than best of all possible worlds might take Him by surprise. He did not will suffering. Evil on earth was beyond his control, but in the Father’s contract with His children, evil was an opportunity for spiritual growth and triumph. The Devil could not prevail, for as man struggled from innocence through sin to redemption he waged a war on His behalf to realize history’s goal of the Heavenly City, the kingdom. King, I explained, accepted some restrictions on God’s power, but could not — would not — believe for a second that He lacked absolute control of events predestined to lead to social liberation and the beloved community.

On our way back to the Nest, tramping along quietly at my side with his hands folded across his midsection (a carry-over from his temple training, the position known as shashu, “forked hands”), his brow furrowed, Smith was brooding. Out of the corner of my eye, I checked him, uneasy by how now he seemed more like the minister than before. “I’m starting to see something,” he said. “Martin don’t hold back nothing for himself.” We tramped on, his silence freighted as he wrestled with his thoughts. “He’s about total surrender, giving it all to God. I been trying to get a handle on him, but sometimes it’s like he ain’t there. Like he’s an instrument, not the music itself — a conduit for something else that’s always just outta my reach.”

“Do you have faith?” I asked.

“What?”

“I said, do you have faith, Chaym?”

“Naw.” His brow tightened. “None. How could I? If you’re saying that’s why I’ve got the shell but not the substance, fuck you, Bishop. There’s nothing but shell, far as I can see. And I’m ready now. You understand? I can do anything he does. Just watch me — and I’ll fucking do it better.”

The call from Doc came on August 4.

Routinely, I’d driven into Carbondale to phone the Lawndale flat, report on Smith’s progress, and keep abreast of the campaign in Chicago. The minister, whose voice was flat and tired, as if he could barely stay awake, asked if we could return for the Marquette march. In the background I heard arguing, voices I could not identify, but the heart of this contentious discussion seemed to center on the escalating backlash against King’s lieutenants, some of them having picketed real estate agencies in the Belmont-Cragin area, and for their trouble saw their parked cars set on fire. SCLC and CCCO workers were at the end of their patience. When King was away, Andrew Young and Al Raby led fifteen hundred demonstrators (they were still falling far short of the turnout they needed) into an Irish-Lithuanian neighborhood near Marquette Park on July 30. The marchers were heckled by residents waving Confederate flags and homemade signs reading NIGGER, HOW YOU WISH YOU WERE WHITE and SEGREGATION IS GOD’S PLAN. Their parked cars were pushed into a lagoon. Predictably, the Chicago police were no help whatsoever. Their cousins and kin lived in these all-white enclaves; after pushing irate white residents into wagons with CENTRAL DETENTION SERVICE labeled on their rear doors they drove them a few blocks away and set them free. Those neighborhoods were explosive, someone in the rundown flat told King. A powder keg waiting to be lit. The minister excused himself, asking me to hold, and I heard him say he agreed the moment was right for confrontation.

Waiting in a phone booth at a rural filling station six hours away from the city, I realized that our weeks downstate, away from newspapers and televisions, had thrown me out of step with the breathless pace of King’s northern campaign. Chicago was still reeling from the riots. The monolith of de facto segregation had barely budged an inch. Blacks were squeezed into ten percent of the city’s area, with only four percent living in the suburbs, where homes ran as high as $15,000. The CCCO, which gave priority to changing inferior education over economic boycotts, was battling to oust despised emblems of segregation in the schools like superintendent Benjamin C. Willis and a high school principal named Miss Chuchut. Yet despite setbacks by Democratic precinct ward-organizers who threatened the poor with loss of their welfare payments if they voted or protested, a degree of progress had been made. Using as their model the tactics of Philadelphia’s Rev. Leon Sullivan, King’s forces created a local chapter of Operation Breadbasket and designated as its director a University of Chicago theology student named Jesse Jackson in a move that ruffled the feathers of more than a few older activists, but the bold young minister did bring home the bacon when a boycott led to better employment for blacks with the Country Delight Dairy chain.

Nevertheless, too little had changed in a campaign that noisily blew into town promising to bring down the walls of economic racism once and for all. Real estate agencies were making a killing off white flight from neighborhoods that in just months turned completely black. Gun sales soared in Slavic districts, and I wondered, as the minister must have wondered, if it was possible to end social evil through actions that did not themselves engender a greater, more devastating evil. Back in 1954, the newspapers had labeled the Montgomery Improvement Association’s nonviolent bus boycott “Gandhian.” The Movement picked up the phrase later, and King was fond of saying Jesus provided the message, Gandhi the method for their social mission. But this was not entirely true. Nor, strictly speaking, faithful to Gandhi, who claimed his greatest ambition was “To make myself zero.” When asked for the secret of his life, the mahatma replied, Tena tyaktena bhunjithah (“Renounce and enjoy”). Howard University activists appropriated the approach of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 1940s, when King was still in college. His version derived from theirs, the Howard leaders who took the body but not necessarily the soul of the mahatma’s method, the surface but not the deepest impulse to renounce materialism and egotism in all their manifestations. Far from being anchored in the dualism of the Christian book, Gandhi’s methods drew from the Bhagavad Gita, which taught him, he insisted, that “those who desire salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” Selfless, humble, detached, living without privacy so that his life was perfectly transparent, seeking no personal gain or profit, indefatigable, Gandhi could meet any social conflict head-on for those he loved, and his intention was never to humiliate or beat down his opponent. How to end evil without engendering error or evil. The question had apparently slowed down Howard’s activists and the SCLC and the CCCO not at all.

Back on the phone, asking the others in the room to hold the noise down, the minister said, “You can be here then? We need everyone now to help …”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We’ll be there by morning.”

Although uneventful, the ride north took longer by two hours because the Chevelle blew a fan belt outside Centralia, and I had to hike to a service station, buy a replacement, then walk back to the car. Smith rode in back with Amy, wearing one of the minister’s dark blue suits, his patterned tie, and clockface cufflinks. From head to toe he was as immaculate as the minister himself when he attended Morehouse and was affectionately known as Tweed. As spit-shined as King felt he had to be at Crozer to bury the stereotype of the Negro as slovenly. Just hours earlier, Amy’d packed his hair with Murray’s Pomade so the waves stood out in neat little rows; she’d creamed his face with Nadinola to clear up a few of his pimples, and he’d splashed on some of the minister’s favorite aftershave lotion, Aramis. On the whole, Smith looked uncomfortable in a suit, with a starched white collar squeezing his throat. And perhaps he was nervous, afraid he would fail at this job he’d petitioned for just as he’d failed at everything else. (And no, we could not keep Smith from strapping on his.357 Magnum, despite my telling him that King, while he did not oppose self-defense, felt edgy if anyone around him wore firearms because years before one of his bodyguards in the South had nearly shot a paperboy.) Amy kept inspecting him, pinching lint off his jacket and from his hair, wetting her handkerchief and rubbing at spots of shaving powder still on his jaw. Surely working so closely with him had been as much a trial for her as it was for me. At the Nest, I noticed that whenever Smith spoke disparagingly about other races — Jews, Chinese, or whites — Amy’s eyes glazed over and grew quiet; they became distant, wall-like, and a sadness fell around her like a scrim. It was not in her nature to make sweeping remarks about any race or group. By the time we returned to the city, Smith, knowing he needed our help, and not wishing to displease her, had shed generalizations of that kind, at least when around Amy.

Come eight o’clock we were on Edens Expressway. I stopped by a service station, where I called Doc again. He did not want a double standing in during the march. No, that duty was too important to relegate to others. He only wanted us nearby. King was optimistic, upbeat. But when the hour of the demonstration arrived, as the temperature climbed to the eighties and I pulled in behind other vehicles entering Gage Park, I felt his decision to keep us on the sidelines was a tactical error.

Smith, fingering a carbuncle on his forehead, saw the crowd first and muttered, “Damn! This ain’t no way to wage a fuckin’ war!” Six hundred Negroes and their white supporters from all walks of life, including the clergy, were gathered on the grass, supported by twelve hundred policemen. Over a thousand angry residents waited, itching for trouble, hooting racial insults and waving flags bearing the Nazi swastika and handwritten signs proclaiming THE ONLY WAY TO END NEGROES IS EXTERMINATION. Tension in the air was thick enough to make me short-winded. The mood was carnival-like — but this circus was from Gehenna, with the sort of gaiety you’d expect from townfolk turning out for the year’s biggest lynching, eagerly awaiting more excitement than they could see that summer at a hundred Riverviews. I stepped out of the Chevelle for a moment carrying a two-way radio to keep in contact with Amy, sweat streaming inside my clothes, down my back, and into my shoes. I prayed that King would come to his senses, change his mind, and stay in the white compact car ahead of us. If he’d ever needed conclusive evidence that the SCLC was out of its element, the swelling mob of young, working-class, Nordic-looking white males in sweaty T-shirts, or with their shirts tied around their throats, straining against the police to get their hands on the marchers — he damned well had that proof now. Down South, they were accustomed to crowds of maybe fifty or seventy. Violent whites were few, a minority of rabble-rousers easily rousted by federal troops. But here? Oh, here they came pouring from their homes in waves, the young and the old, healthy and infirm, Polish, Germans, and Italians who fought among themselves constantly but today were bonded by blood against a common foe determined, they believed, to take away their precious homes. The boys had greasy, slicked-back hair and packs of cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves at shoulder level like refugees from movies starring Marlon Brando and Sal Mineo. One, with his cap turned backward, could have been Leo Gorcey. Others wore dark sunglasses. Cowboy hats. Handkerchiefs were wrapped as headbands across their brows. Watching them as they poured into the park, some riding on the shoulders of others in order to see and shouting, We want King!, I realized they had come far better prepared than Doc’s people. Cherry bombs, difficult to distinguish from gunfire, exploded around the Chevelle and King’s car as we inched forward into a sea of urban thugs. Rotten eggs splattered the Chevelle’s windshield, coating it so I couldn’t see and started swearing when my wipers failed to work. I turned the car over to Amy and scrambled out into the crowd, hoping to get closer to the minister’s car. On my left, good white Catholics spit in the faces of priests and nuns committed to civil rights. My heart was hammering. Now I knew why Smith had said we — Negroes — were despised worldwide, for we had done nothing to this crowd. Nothing to earn such revulsion and violence. In fact, there was something biblical, mythic, and ritualistic in their hatred of their darker brothers, something in the blood, as if to found and sustain a city, a sacrificial slaughter must take place. Beer-bellied white men, cigars tucked in the corners of their mouths, screamed for King’s appearance and pounded on the park’s grass with baseball bats. Others chanted white power slogans, calling the black marchers (who carried signs that read HOW LONG? and OPEN UP CHICAGO!) monkeys. They shouted, “Where’s Martin Luther Coon!” and “Kill the nigger-lovers!” at cops who to their astonishment found themselves faced off (Matthew 10:34–39) against their own cousins, sisters, and in-laws.

Into this chaos stepped King.

He emerged from his car into a shower of spit, rocks, beer bottles, and firecrackers. For just an instant I saw fear and bewilderment flicker across his face. No, for this he was not ready. This might well be his day to yield up the ghost. Certainly it would be the longest, most treacherous walk of his career. He was completely surrounded by enemies, the forces of Gog and Magog, people he did not know but who believed they knew him, and what they knew they hated enough to kill. Christ had never encountered rabid crowds like this at Golgotha. Enveloping him on all sides — like devils in a circle of hell created for him alone — twisted white lips spewed obscenities, white fingers clawed through the crowd to tear at his tailored blue suit. Out of nowhere a brick came singing through the air. Dazed, he dropped to his knees. Immediately Jesse Jackson and other Movement lieutenants drawn from the Vice Lords and Saints threw themselves between King and the crowd, forcing his head down until the injured philosopher stopped seeing double, rose again to his feet, rocking a little back and forth on his heels, and whispered more to himself than anyone else, “I’m all right, don’t worry about me. I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it. This is what we wanted. Keep moving …”

They pushed deeper down streets packed with hysterical white homeowners. Reporters and cameramen from the conservative Tribune and Daily News darted around them, wearing protective helmets and keeping their heads ducked. King, dwarfed on all sides, blood and sweat spangling his brow, pulled off his tie; he unbuttoned the top of his shirt, and did not so much walk as he was carried forward by the crowd inside a girdle of gang members, all sworn to nonviolence, who hove close to the sidewalks, providing a flesh-and-blood barrier for the minister’s troops to march in rows of eight on pavement hot enough to fry an egg. Then: over the heads of the crowd I saw a knife hurtling toward the minister. The blade, missing King entirely, buried itself in a bystander. The blue-helmeted police saw nothing. They were dodging rocks and debris, hitting the ground en masse, incapable of holding back hecklers whose numbers swelled to five thousand as the marchers stepped over broken glass and at last reached their destination, the Halvorsen agency at 3145 West 63rd Street. There, beneath the company’s sign (REAL ESTATE INSURANCE sales management appraisals), in front of its long glass window, King, rubbing his forehead, kneeled down to pray.

Amy’s voice crackled over my radio. “Matthew, I can’t see anything from here! What’s going on?”

“They’re heading back your way,” I said. “Get Chaym into Doc’s car—”

“What?”

“Just do it!”

Somehow the marchers safely retraced their steps to Marquette Park. In the bedlam of chartered buses and automobiles tearing away, wrecked cars tipped on their sides, their leather interiors blazing, we switched Smith and the minister; Doc rode hunched down in the backseat of the Chevelle to his flat on the West Side, and Smith traveled in the car in which King had come, a gang of whites chasing after him with sticks until the driver put pedal to metal and left them in a cloud of carbon monoxide.

Within minutes of our arrival at South Hamlin Street, no sooner than I had the minister upstairs and Smith back in the Chevelle out of sight with Amy in an alleyway, the apartment and hallway filled with Movement workers, all maneuvering to get the minister’s attention. At the kitchen table he sat still shaking from his most recent brush with death, his suitcoat draped over the chair behind him, his shirtcuffs bunched up to his elbows, tie unbraided, and his head canted left as a young woman with skinny legs washed the wound on his forehead, then smoothed a Band-Aid just above and to the right of his eyebrow. While she ministered to him, smacking him lightly on the shoulder when he moved, he smoked cigarettes end-on-end and talked steadily to his captains in the packed room in which two weeks earlier I’d introduced him to Smith.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” His eyes squeezed shut for a second; the blow to his temple had brought on the worst headache he’d felt in years. “We’ve been in demonstrations all over the South — Mississippi, Alabama — but I’ve never seen mobs as full of hate or as hostile as the ones we saw today. Nothing like this!”

One of his staff members, a lean minister standing to his left, agreed. “There is a bright side. The boys you picked from the gangs to be march captains acquitted themselves pretty well.”

“Yes … yes, you’re right. I saw a couple of them with broken noses and bruises”—he rubbed his own nose—“but none of them struck back. Lord, I hope the reporters put that in the newspapers. It proves the opposite of what they’ve been saying — what Daley and J. H. Jackson said about demonstrations igniting violence on our side.”

I interrupted, wanting to tell him about our last two weeks with Smith. But the instant I called his name, he cut me off.

“Matthew, I didn’t see you standing there! Do you have a minute? There’s something I must speak alone with you about, if you don’t mind.”

He grabbed his coat and squeezed through a crush of people in the hallway, leading me into the bathroom, then closed the door, which muffled the chattering and constantly ringing phone outside. The minister lowered himself onto the covered toilet seat and, fumbling inside his coat pocket, looked up.

“Sometimes this is the only room where I can go to get a little peace and quiet.”

“I understand, sir.” (And I did: his namesake, Martin Luther, was reported to have experienced illumination while seated on the throne of Denmark.)

“I’m pleased by how you’ve handled your project. After the demonstration those hooligans took off after him, not us, and he didn’t suffer a scratch. You know, with a little more work this can become a great institution.”

King located what he wanted in his coat. An envelope containing five one-hundred-dollar bills for Smith’s first month. We’d agreed cash payments would replace checks. There would be no paper trail. No trace of his alter ego’s existence.

“He does favor me, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, sir — even more now than before.”

“Do you have other plans for him tonight?”

“Tonight?” I looked at my wrist, realized I didn’t have a watch on and was staring at skin, but not knowing what else to do I looked for a full three seconds anyway.

“Around seven, yes,” Doc said. “I’d like to send him out to a Negro church in the suburbs — Calvary AME — to pick up an award they’re giving me. Do you think he can do that?”

“I’m not … sure. This was his first day … You can’t be there?”

“Oh, maybe, if things settle down here. I’ll do my best to get away, but I’d like Chaym there just in case. He won’t have to give a speech or anything. Just shake hands and say thank you. Do you think he can handle this? I’d hate to disappoint the parishioners at Reverend Coleman’s church who invited me.”

“We can try,” I said.

Then he wanted to use the bathroom. Stepping back into the hallway, I saw Amy by the front door, not downstairs at the car where I’d left her and asked specifically that she take care of Chaym. I could tell she’d been crying. I led her outside to the stairs, away from the others, and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Chaym kicked me out of the car. Matthew, he can be terrible sometimes!” Amy leaned into my shoulder and cried a little more. I closed my eyes, inhaling her perfume, feeling her fingers on my chest, her belly against mine. Instinctively, as I held my breath, both my hands lifted to pull her closer, but I resisted that impulse, and simply stood motionless until she was cried out and moved away, wiping her eyes. “Sometimes I’d like to hit him, except it’d feel like hitting Dr. King.”

“Okay,” I said, “what’s bothering him? Everything went perfectly.”

“Yes, but it’s not what he wants now. He says we’re treating him like a clay pigeon. A decoy. Chaym says he’s better than that, as good as King any day, and he wants a chance to prove it.”

“Maybe he’s got it.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll explain later. You said he’s still in the car?”

“Last time I looked, but—”

I was halfway down the stairs before she finished, pushing through a crowd at the door and SCLC workers holding them back. I circled round the block to where we’d left the Chevelle, but I was thinking of Amy, how warm and soft she’d felt in the crook of my arm. I’d wanted badly to hold her. Problem was, the fool I’d made of myself in the farmhouse was green in my memory, and I decided I could be satisfied with just being there, asking for nothing, if she needed my shoulder, or a hand to hold, or someone to listen. Outcasts, I’d learned from Chaym (though perhaps he failed at this himself), learned not to ask for much, yet were there if the Abelites were in need.

I walked up behind the Chevelle and saw Smith so absorbed in what he was doing he failed to hear my footsteps approaching. He was rummaging, I realized, through his suitcoat. Then he found what he was looking for. A small case containing a hypodermic needle wrapped in cotton. Smith tore off his coat, unbuttoned the left cuff of his shirt, and rolled back the sleeve. He jabbed his fingers along the length of his forearm, found a likely spot, and held the needle up, pushing out its air bubble. I watched him lick a spot on his forearm wet and shiny with spittle; then he broke skin with the needle and, his eyes heavily lidded, he watched thin fluid vanish from the needle into his vein.

He replaced the needle in its case, put that in the jacket pocket, dropped his head back on the car’s vinyl seat, and let his tortured mind dream. For a long time I did not move; I did not wish to interrupt him, for without dreams, even drug-induced ones, all a black man has left are nightmares. After I got hold of myself, I walked to his window and knocked with my knuckles on the glass.

“Doc says he needs us tonight. You up for that, Chaym?”

He sniffed and nodded. “I’m good.”

“I’ll bet. Can you accept an award for him?”

“Hell yeah, I’m ready to do anything.”

“You want to talk?”

“What the fuck about? You wanna talk to somebody, Bishop, go to confession.”

I let that ride, easing onto the front seat beside him, resolving to say nothing of what I’d seen to either Doc or Amy. As long as he could do the job, and cover the minister’s back if a gig went sour, who was I, after all, to cast the first stone?