Dreamer

7

Calvary AME Church, a pitched-roof, redbrick building with two lancet-arched doorways and a blue and white sign swinging from its southwest edge on the corners of Emerson and Darrow streets in the quiet, progressive suburb of Evanston, was plain and inconspicuous enough for travelers to completely miss — like so much in the black world — if they weren’t looking for it. Its rich, never recorded history was hidden inside, stored within every parishioner, or so Amy said that evening after the Marquette march as we sped down the Outer Drive, crossing bustling Howard Street into a sleepy suburb quite different from south or west Chicago. The riots and agony of marching in the city had largely bypassed the cultural island of Evanston. Most black residents were too busy making a living and caring for their children to take a day off for civil disobedience, though they cared deeply about the Movement’s northern campaign and cheered King, the rebel messiah, the almost paradoxical fusion of Cain and Abel, when the Chicago campaign put into practice his ingenious method of “creative tension” aimed at disrupting the status quo by forcing long-buried hatreds to surface, where they were exposed for the world to see. King’s philosophy notwithstanding, “creative tension” was an act of violence, the murder of a repressive past so that a new order — God’s order — could be born. Yet Evanston, while not the fabled Promised Land, was a curious pocket of tranquillity compared to the Black Belt. There, residents could walk safely at night from one end of town to the other. Liquor was not sold — for that you had to drive to Skokie. There were white millionaires, blue-collar black homeowners bonded by church affiliations, an integrated school system, stores and movie theaters (three), and some years the best public high school in the nation. (However, the school superintendent did demand parental permission on both sides before he would condone interracial dating.)

Because Mama Pearl, once an employee of Fanny’s Restaurant in Evanston, occasionally attended services with friends at Calvary AME, Amy knew something of the town’s older black residents, mostly craftsmen — plumbers and electricians — transplanted from the South during World War II, whole families that migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from the Mississippi Delta, from Tennessee and Arkansas and western Kentucky in the greatest mass movement of humanity in American history. They were, in their own way, initially outcasts. Their church, started in Philadelphia in 1787 after the Great Awakening by Richard Allen, was equidistant from the ivied halls and manicured lawns of Northwestern University and the all-black Center Hospital, situated on the canal dividing Evanston from lily-white Skokie. According to Amy’s mother, nearly half the church’s teenagers came into the world at Center Hospital, and each could claim a single, courageous black woman, Dr. Jennifer Hale, as the person who saw them before their own mothers and spanked wind into their lungs. Amy said that decades earlier when Hale, a beautiful, buff-colored young doctor with the gentility one associates with Creoles, arrived in Evanston, she discovered that black patients were turned away from the doors of Evanston’s white hospital farther north near Wilmette, regardless of how sick they might be. Segregation forced Hale to ferry her patients to hospitals on Chicago’s South Side, and too many died on the way for her to rest with this disastrous arrangement. She was outraged. Her patients, while pariahs to the white population, worked in white homes and saved to send their children to college — that, after forming their own neighborhood YMCA and colored Boy and Girl Scout chapters; some held down three jobs a week, always struggling and sacrificing to free their sons and daughters from the curse of color that hung over their own lives. The idea of public assistance was anathema to many of them, such a blow to their southern pride that they never considered for a moment turning outside their own families — or extended families — for help. They treated all the black children at Calvary AME as their own, scolding them and telling their parents if in public they behaved in ways that reflected badly on the struggling community as a whole.

By mobilizing blacks and whites of conscience, Hale became one of the principal players in first envisioning, then coaxing into being, Center Hospital; and by doing this, Amy said, she saved countless black lives as well as created jobs for other doctors, nurses, and dentists of color. The hospital, though never as large or as well-funded as its white counterpart, was nevertheless something of a beacon of pride for local blacks in the 1950s, and Dr. Hale justly held a place of high esteem in Evanston. Her life was her work. She never married, but she delivered countless baby boomers after the war — her “children,” she called them — and many were pleasantly shocked to realize that Hale recognized them by name twenty years later as she traveled from one Evanston home to another, making house calls.

Among her elderly patients, those belonging to the first black wave that migrated to Evanston, was a congenial black contractor named Robert Jackson whose company won the contract for building Calvary AME, and who, even after the white hospital began accepting Negro patients, remained loyal to Center and allowed his relations to take him nowhere else. They belonged to the same era, Dr. Hale and contractor Jackson — a breed of black men and women, like King’s parents and Amy’s great-grandfather, so toughened by prejudice, by the rule of having to do twice as much as whites to get half as far, that they regarded no problem as insurmountable. With little formal education, he’d come north from a farm near Abbeville in South Carolina during the 1920s, bringing nothing more with him than a strong back, a quick wit, and a burning need to succeed against staggering odds; he checked out Chicago, then moved to Evanston, where Negroes found leftovers from the tables of well-to-do whites somewhat larger than the scraps tossed to blacks in the city. No question, there was a residue of apartheid here. Black women, when cleaning some white homes, were likely to find literature from the John Birch Society on the living room coffee tables. But where others saw only racial restrictions and what they couldn’t do, Jackson, a tall, dark-fired man who was most certainly a follower of Booker T. Washington, believed in his bones that opportunities had to be made by Negroes if they were to happen at all. Was the hospital segregated? Did Northwestern’s sororities exclude blacks in their charters? Were white milk companies denying service to colored folks who settled in Evanston after their long sojourn from Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama? Always a man who preferred work and getting his hands dirty to complaining, building to bellyaching, Bob Jackson responded to racism by founding the Jackson Dairy Company. Every morning before daybreak he delivered on black doorsteps milk in pint bottles of thick, sturdy glass that bore his name on the front and on the back the reminder This bottle not sold … Wash and Return. He labored to put his business in the black (no pun intended, Amy said), came up with a catchy jingle for it, and did well enough, thank you, until the Depression brought it abruptly to an end, but not by any means his restlessness, ambition, and sense of industry.

Construction work came next, mainly as a way to make ends meet, though Bob Jackson was never satisfied, according to what Amy’d learned from her grandmother, working for other people. He stayed on the crew long enough to learn the ropes, then ventured out on his own again, this time unveiling yet another dream that had him up pacing the floor at night and pulling his hair, the little he had in his late fifties. By name, the dream was the Jackson Construction Company. And his first act as an entrepreneur was to offer jobs to the sons of his brothers down South. The elder Jackson’s new business thrived for decades, drawing on a pool of black subcontractors who helped him raise churches, apartment complexes, and residences — places for his people to live and worship their god — all over the North Shore, including the two-story, many-roomed building he built for himself in the heart of the black community on Simpson Street, with rental spaces on the first floor for a beauty parlor and a barbershop.

The product of his labor made Bob Jackson a proud man well enough off to buy a bench for his family at Calvary AME, where his nieces sang in the choir; for despite obstacles and a hundred white men who’d stood in his way (and were now deservedly long forgotten, with no monuments on the landscape to mark their existence), he could boast that his blood built this town. With many black Evanstonians he shared the belief that life was getting better, that their offerings to the Lord had been blessed a hundredfold since they left the South, and with legal segregation struck down he counseled his platoon of grand-nephews and — nieces (spared the devastating discrimination he’d known) that if they were genuinely concerned about the economic inequities they saw in the world, “The best thing you children can do for the poor is not be one of them.” On the surface it sounded harsh, but his relations knew their great-uncle meant something else, that by fulfilling his duties as a householder, by creating wealth, he always had deep pockets into which their fathers and mothers could reach for funds when they needed the down payment on a home, or extra cash to cover their bills when they were between jobs. Bob Jackson paid his grand-nieces and — nephews four dollars for every A they received at Noyes Elementary School and Sidles Junior High, three dollars for every B (nothing for a C), and established a trust fund they could draw upon for college tuition because more than anything else he wanted them to have the one thing he lacked in 1966 that kept him from becoming a millionaire. “Get an education,” he told them. “Don’t you put anything ahead of that.”

Smith was scrunched down in the backseat of the Chevelle, allowing Amy to apply a Band-Aid to exactly the spot on his forehead where the minister was struck by a brick. “That’s who’s coming to this church tonight?” He was still high, sailing on heroin. His voice trembled. “People like them?”

“Probably,” Amy said. “People like Mr. Jackson’s kin, Dr. Hale, and Leroy Young. He rewired the bookstore, Great Expectations, over near the university. They don’t make headlines. They’re just proud, quietly pious, good people. Like the folks in Doc’s community in Atlanta.” She gazed out the window at palatial homes perched far back from the road on Ridge Avenue. “They’re the ones who want to honor Doc. I’m pretty sure Elijah Muhammad would bomb here.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this before I said I’d do it.”

“Why?” she asked. “Does it matter?”

“Yeah, it matters. Everything here seems so … finished. God loves these Negroes. What do I say to them?”

“Nothing!” I whirled round in my seat, grabbed his tie, and pulled his head toward me. “You don’t say a blessed thing, Chaym, you hear me? That’s not what we’re here for.” I almost lost control of the steering wheel, so I let his tie go, and took a deep breath to steady myself. “Besides, I don’t think you’re ready. Just accept the goddamn prize for Doc and get down off the pulpit as soon as you can. Tell the pastor you’re tired. Tell him you’ve got laryngitis. Tell him anything, but wrap this up as fast as you can. If you don’t, you’ll ruin everything. Got that?”

“You don’t think I’m good enough to give a speech here?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s what you meant,” he grumbled. “Shit, as long as he’s alive, I guess I’ll always be nothing.”

Amy cleared her throat to end the conversation. “Matthew, look in the rearview mirror.”

“Why?”

“Just look, will you?”

I cranked down my window and in the mirror affixed to the door saw a plain green Plymouth about five car-lengths behind us.

“Those Wise Guys,” said Smith, “have been baby-sittin’ us since we left Doc’s apartment. I recognize the plates. That’s a government car …”

Amy pressed her nose against the back window. “Why’re they following us?”

“I’ll give you three guesses,” said Smith, “and the first two don’t count. You gonna call this off?”

“No.” I slowed the car to a crawl. “I think I can circle around the block and lose them.”

Amy shook my shoulder. “Are you kiddin’? The church is straight ahead and — oh no, will you — will you look at that?”

The entire block from Dodge Avenue to Darrow was cordoned off. Vans from local radio and television stations were parked alongside the church, closed in by a crowd I estimated to be at five or six hundred. A traffic cop, young, still wearing his sunglasses though it was twilight, waved vehicles west up Emerson Street toward Skokie. I slowed the Chevelle even more, rolled down my window, told the cop I was bringing the minister for tonight’s service, then turned right toward the church when he let me through. The green Plymouth eased toward the curb at the end of the block. Sunlight was fading fast. I couldn’t clearly see the faces of the men following us, and then there was no time to think about them because Calvary AME’s pastor, Rev. Jacob Coleman, a tidy-looking, tea-colored man with a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole who’d been waiting inside the door, rushed outside. He took Smith by the arm, explaining that his ushers would provide security, and led us through people trying to touch or detain the man they thought was King to the rear of the church.

Inside a tiny kitchen behind the main room, Smith began to unravel. I should have seen it coming. I should have known. When the magnitude of what the minister asked us to do finally dawned on him, when he was at last standing at the door of his first real performance as a double, Smith collapsed heavily onto a wooden folding chair and began mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. His breathing was ragged, asthmatic. Suddenly he began hiccuping uncontrollably, almost strangling, and looked helplessly toward Amy. I knew she was thinking the same as me. It was over. He was ready for riding in decoy cars, for drawing fire away from King, but not for standing before an audience of over five hundred of the genuinely faithful … He was going to crash and burn, as he’d always done in the Citivas Dei. Blow this operation wide open. Fall on his face and embarrass us all. Or worse, pass out right there in the kitchen in front of Calvary AME’s ushers and clergy.

“Is something wrong?” Rev. Coleman asked.

Amy eased herself between the pastor and Smith. “Give us a few minutes alone, okay? He just needs to compose himself before he gets his cue.”

Reluctantly Rev. Coleman cleared the kitchen, leaving Amy and Smith to themselves.

I left through a side door and joined the congregation, taking a spot to the right of the pulpit. I scanned the crowd, my eyes tracking packed wooden pews in the northeast corner to the laity filling the seats and aisles in front of me, men in their best (and only) dark suits brought out from the back of their closets every Sunday or for occasions such as this, their brogans shined and buffed the night before, cooling themselves with fans provided on the back of each bench, their wives, bearing names such as Adella, Inell, and Luberta, sitting quietly beside them in light cotton dresses, some wearing gloves despite the heat of bodies packed so close together on the benches, perspiration just beginning to bead on their foreheads, dampening at the root oil-heavy hairdos subjected earlier in the day to the straightening comb; I picked out Robert Jackson, a dignified, immaculately dressed, balding Negro sitting on the bench he bought at Calvary, then to his right another old man in a rimpled K-Mart suit, holding a wide-brimmed hat on his lap. My eyes moved up, up above them, to a triptych of stained-glass windows on the western wall, one depicting an alb-clad Jesus standing before Herod’s jeering soldiers in the praetorium, another showing Jesus during his lonely vigil of fasting in the desert, the large middle painting portraying a mob hanging him from the cross, and though I knew I was supposed to be watching the crowd, scanning the room every few seconds, my eyes never resting anywhere for long because who knew where an assassin might appear, the feeling that always flooded through me when I entered Negro churches came over me again — the sense, right or wrong, that for the briefest of moments I was safe from the ravages, the irreality, the racial stupidities of the world outside Calvary’s doors, that no harm could befall anyone here where so much of value was preserved, meaning made manifest in the minutest details by black people who came to this place, sacred and set off from the chaos of the streets outside, to find husbands and wives, to baptize their children, and to bury their dead before gathering at the home of the deceased, sharing memories of her with the survivors, and being fed by her friends and neighbors who filled the kitchen table with food as a reminder that the bereaved must take nourishment, no matter if they were hungry or not, and walk on, and know that death was not final, because Jesus conquered that once and for all, so yes, eat and be joyful even in mourning because no Christian should forget the good news of the gospel, and no believer in Him ever feel alone or have cause for despair. From my childhood came a verse, Nevermore thou needest seek Me / I am with thee everywhere: / Raise the stone and thou shalt find Me / Cleave the wood and I am there. This was what Calvary’s congregation believed. What I had been taught from the time I could walk. Religion (Latin religare, “to bind,” or bring together those things broken, torn asunder). But was all this, I wondered, an illusion? Badly I wanted to believe, as they did. Behind me I heard twenty teenage girls in white blouses and black skirts blending their voices in the opening hymn, “Amazing Grace,” wringing that song out so thoroughly it outstripped anything on WVON’s “Top Forty.” An old woman who favored Helen Martin about the face stroked the keys of an ancient piano, and while I did not know if her faith was ill-founded, I did know it was here — and only here, in the Negro church, for the last hundred years — that black people pooled their money in order to send the congregation’s best students on to train at schools like Morehouse and Fisk; here that teachers selflessly used their weekends and nights to tutor children and conduct Sunday-school classes that, beginning with the Bible, branched out forward and back in the better seminars to examine the preconditions for Christianity and all the intellectual and scientific traditions it had influenced from Tertullian to quantum physics; here that a young Romare Bearden encountered the cornucopia of styles and forms — in spirituals, hymns, prayers, and sermons — that opened him to the epic dialogue that was art; and here, finally, that the civil rights movement was nurtured and sustained, prayer and racial politics inseparably melded by clergy, stewards, and trustees who, if they knew nothing else, understood that they served their people best by reminding them again and again that their political and racial struggles were but the backdrop against which a far greater spiritual odyssey was unfolding, and that no worldly triumph deserved hallelujahs if in their secular victories they somehow lost their souls.

At Calvary’s crowded entrance I saw the Wise Guys.

There were two of them, one a hairless, pursy, middle-aged little man in horn-rimmed glasses, slow-moving as a turtle, his belly bubbling over his belt. The other was Titian-haired, thin, in his twenties, his profile made birdlike by a hawkbill nose, carrying a notepad he scribbled on in shorthand, never looking down at the page. They looked tired; they kept shifting their weight from one leg to the other, as if maybe their feet hurt. In another context they might have been Mormons working a neighborhood, tramping from door to door. These were the ones who followed us from the West Side, whom I’d seen on the road in rural Illinois, and who now no doubt were taking down names. They looked intensely interested when the audience rose to its feet and erupted into clapping and cheers.

Amy walked in behind King — it most certainly was King, not Chaym Smith — from the kitchen to a row of seats on the stage. I had no idea how the minister had gotten here at the last minute, but I muttered thanks to the Almighty, for the prayer I’d made had come to pass, and I released my breath, which I felt I’d been holding for hours.

And then the audience settled down. Whether the minister knew it or not, his physical presence, while not imposing, brought a hush like soft background music, or as if someone cracked a window in a crowded, smoke-filled room. I felt something in him sorely lacking in myself — grace or a spiritual wealth so great he could give of himself endlessly, and always there was twelve basketfuls left over, as one might dip a cup into the sea and never see it emptied. He was an old soul. Centuries old. Not putting on a show, he stopped all conversation and commanded respect; not justifying himself, he was distinguished; not boasting, he was instantly acknowledged. Standing beside Rev. Coleman at the forest of black microphones on the pulpit, with flashbulbs exploding like fireworks in the hands of the Associated Press and British newsmen who rushed to the front of the church, he was august, hugely present, relaxed, munificent, established in mercy, but at his center I felt a cemetery — a coolness and crypt — in which all regard for himself and his safety lay buried. Something in him was dead, extinguished so long ago during the Montgomery boycott when he was hardly more than a boy that it no longer even existed in memory In some way that I could not coax into clarity, his very presence challenged me and commented, without his having yet said a word, on my own staggering shortcomings as a man, a Negro, a Christian. The level he was living on did that. No newspaper article or television interview touched what I felt that evening. To engage him at all, this preacher who dared to say, “There will be no permanent end to the race problem until oppressed men develop the capacity to love their enemies,” who quoted Epictetus, Keats, Emerson, and Dunbar as if they were his first cousins — to meet him face-to-face, I realized, forced a man to kick up his own thoughts and feelings a notch or two, as you might when going one-on-one with the finest athletes on a playing field, so that even mediocre men like me rose momentarily to finer planes of performance.

“It is with great pleasure,” said Rev. Coleman, “that I present this Achievement Award to you from the grateful membership of Calvary AME Church.” He handed a heavy plaque, gold lettering engraved on black, to the minister and shook his hand vigorously; then, smiling, Coleman turned the ceremony over to King.

I should have been watching the crowd, but I could not wrench my eyes away as King, the portrait of composure that evening, despite all he’d endured only hours earlier, placed the plaque to one side on a small table of flowers, his movements as flawless as those of a fish, his fingers seeming to merge with the surface of the pulpit. More than any place else, he was at home there, in the pulpit, leaning into the microphones, having preached since his teens beside his father, and then during his college years in the Baptist churches of King Senior’s friends in Boston and throughout the South, incorporating the best of what he learned from Mays and Brightman in their classrooms into sermons he thrilled audiences with — in his early twenties — the very next Sunday. How had he put it in one sermon? “As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow. But to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” He never knew — could never know — exactly what the room he was to speak in would look like. For the briefest of instants, the length of an Amen, he adjusted his voice to the room’s unique acoustics and the placement of the stage. He got through these engagements, for which he was paid between $500 and $1,000, by focusing exclusively on the present moment, living completely in the here, the now, oblivious to whatever programs he had scheduled for the next day, willfully forgetful of how well or poorly he’d done before. His experience of time was reduced, on the road, to seriality, fully lived moments — like islands — separate from one another: he was here (Chicago) and here (Jamaica) and here (Paris) with little bridge between locations. Some days it felt as if his life dissolved or abruptly cut from place to place, as in a film.

Fortunately, he didn’t truly need notes anymore. He’d done this so often before that he could speak for two hours or three without once looking down. The quotations he needed were permanently imprinted in his memory. All he need do was “switch,” as he put it to himself, into a public mode, and the words, one whole structured paragraph after another, came pouring out of him. In his teens, when speaking became effortless this way, he’d wonder after an event, “Did I really do that?” because his public self had seemed so different to him, like a mask; but then he realized some few years later that man and mask were fused. His private self was the mask. The Movement left no room for subjectivity; inner and outer were the same.

“Thank you … thank you very much,” he said as he glanced around the church, making visual contact with everyone, including those crammed into the balconies. “A moment ago, Reverend Coleman asked me if I was disillusioned after today’s march. He asked me if I felt we were wrong to come to Chicago, and what did I make of the hatred we saw in Marquette Park. Now, I can’t lie to you. I was stunned. In every one of those screaming white faces I saw hatred that obliterated the last vestiges of humanity. I saw sickness and evil brought on by segregation and sinruined lives. Because, you see, those people were living in fear. They were afraid that accepting Negroes as their neighbors — or anybody different — meant they’d lose their homes, their jobs, their place in society, possibly even their sons and daughters in marriage to people who don’t look the way they do. They feared losing their sense of self, and we all know that’s the most powerful fear on earth, the one that fuels all the others. Fear, I’ve been told, is a drug — it releases peptide hormones that have the same pharmacologie characteristics as opium. You could say that anyone experiencing fear is narcoticized, not in his right mind, mesmerized, in the constant state of hypnosis so many metaphysicians tell us is the human condition. That’s what I saw today. People throwing bricks at phantoms. Shouting at shadows, since there are no Negroes, and whites either, except of course in their own deluded minds …

“After liberating lunch counters, winning court battles and homes in nice neighborhoods, we must in our next campaign free consciousness itself from fear, from what William Blake called ‘mind-forg’d manacles.’ But to do this we must unlearn many things. We must be quiet and not deluded or deceived by the creations of our own minds. The soil of the soul must be plowed. Reverend Coleman”—he squinted behind him at the pastor sitting rapt beside Amy—“the answer to your question is that no man can bring me so low as to make me hate him, no matter what we ran up against today in Chicago, because hate is based on fear, and I don’t fear losing anything since I willingly gave up everything to the one I love.”

The audience sang back, “Preach!”

“That’s right,” he went on, raising his right hand to tug at his earlobe, light spinning off his simple wedding band, “I’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to fear because after being in the storm so long I’ve learned to accept only one problem: What is God? Every night when I get down on my knees to pray or close my eyes in quiet meditation I’m holding a funeral for the self. I’m digging a little grave for the ego. I’m saying, like the lovely Catholic nun I read about who works with the poor in Calcutta, that I will despoil myself of all that is not God; I will strip my heart of every created thing; I will live in poverty and detachment; I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make myself a willing servant of the will of God. As Whitehead might put it, ‘I am’ is an example of Misplaced Concreteness. And what’s left when you get the I out of the way? Only the others, living and dead, who are already so thoroughly integrated into our lives you can never get rid of them. No, the segregationists lost before they even began. Nothing stands alone. You know, not one member of the White Citizens’ Council can finish breakfast in the morning without relying on the rest of the world. That sponge ‘Bull’ Connor bathes with came from the Pacific Islands. His towel was spun in Turkey. The coffee Orval Faubus drinks traveled all the way from South America, the tea from China, the cocoa from West Africa. And every time George Wallace or Malcolm X writes his name he’s using ink evolved from India and an alphabet inherited from the Romans, who derived it from the Greeks after they’d borrowed it from Phoenicians, who received their symbols from Seirites living on the Sinai peninsula between Egypt and Palestine … After a time, I tell you, a man comes to see only a We, this precious moment as a tissue in time holding past, future, and present, with all of us in the red, everlasting debtors — ontological thieves — in a universe of interrelatedness … Every man and woman is a speculum, our mirror. Our twin.”

Shivers played across my shoulders. The more I listened and looked, the more I suspected that it was Smith, not King, at the microphone, speaking to all gathered, yes, but in a way not to us at all — or, more exactly, to the spirit immanent in each parishioner, offering his speech as a form of sacrifice, holding nothing back, forgetting himself utterly in the demands of the moment and allowing the Father within him to doeth the work and the Father within us to receive it,

“Think about it.” He stroked his chin now, continuing without notecards or a single piece of paper in front of him. “We do everything we can to avoid facing ourselves and, by virtue of that, the real structure of reality, which Sir James Jeans, the physicist, tells us is more like a great thought than a machine driven by matter. Sir Arthur Eddington put it just as succinctly, saying — if I remember this right—‘The external world of physics has become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.’ Yet and still, most of us have carnal minds. Crude minds. We forget that nothing burns in hell except self-will. We seldom, if ever, think four-dimensionally. Lord, we hate to think at all, judging by how we spend our time. By the time most of you are sixty-five years old, you will have looked at 102,000 hours of television, heard 25,000 hours of radio, seen 300,000 comic pages and 3,599 movies, drunk 18,000 bottles of beer and 3,000 fifths of whiskey … and never devoted one hour to meditating on the truth that whatever is done to the least of us is done to all, and to the Lord we say we love. If you believe in Jesus, then you believe in the man who sleeps outside your door on the street. The single woman struggling to feed her children. The worker deprived of his job. You believe in the brokenhearted, the poor, the unemployed, the captive, the blind, the bruised. And all the countless outcasts tossed to one side by a society that values profits more than it does people. But I know that at the numinous heart of being, there is a Heart, a Father who, if we approach the poor by one span, will come to us by one cubit; if we move toward the needy one cubit, He draws nearer by a fathom; if we love all men as our brothers, He embraces us with a redemption greater than any fortune in the world. Brothers and sisters, Reverend Coleman, no man can make me hate. I have no choice but to love others because I am the others. Reason (to say nothing of self-interest) demands that I care for them as much as I do for myself.

“I should stop now, I suppose. A wise man once said, ‘Speech is always the great-grandson of truth’ … Thank you, and God bless you for your kindness.”

He back pedaled from the pulpit and bowed. Throughout the church there was silence. Moments later, thunderous applause. Parishioners sprang to their feet, throwing paper fans and programs into the air, shouting, pressing toward the stage. The older of the Wise Guys was talking to someone on his two-way radio, plugging his ear with one finger to muffle the calls for the speaker to give them more. I broke free from the spell his words had woven and scrambled from my position, heading back to the kitchen to congratulate Smith — once he pulled away from his admirers — on a stunning sermon that would have made King proud. But as I pushed open the side door, I saw our charge standing off to one side in the shadows — like a shadow himself, staring up at the stage where the parishioners hugged King (it had been him after all), shook his hand, posed to be in photos beside him, and clamored for his autograph. Who could doubt that this man had won his wings, his seat in Glory? Smith watched with perfect, everyman impotence and awe the love and admiration showered on his famous twin, seeing the Good but powerless to be it, lost in his littleness, and to me it seemed King’s double was undergoing a kind of living death in the great man’s presence, despite his intense training and desire to be remembered by God. Obviously, His children did not see Chaym in the shadows. Nor, I thought, would they ever.

I went to his side, placing my hand on his shoulder. Smith dropped his eyes, staring at his feet, almost as if he was ashamed of — and despised — his own being. “How does he do that?” He was not, I saw, talking to me. “Some of the things he said … That was my stuff. Not things I’ve ever said, but stuff I’ve felt. Like my spirit is trapped in his, which is so much clearer and bigger and cleaner. His voice … It feels when he’s preaching like his words come from inside me, not outside — like he gives my soul a voice. It doesn’t make sense …”

“C’mon,” I said. “I think we better go. It’s been a long day. We can stay at my apartment in the city tonight.” I asked Amy to bring the Chevelle around back, then nudged Smith toward the rear of the church so we could exit unseen, and I was so exhausted from the day’s events that I failed to notice the old man in the wrinkled K-Mart suit until he was upon us, and I was staring at a clump of brown clay with two chips of glass stuck in the center: his eyes. His cheap suit fit him miserably. His trousers dropped like drapery, not touching his wing tips but riding above his ankles and black socks so old the elastic was gone, leaving one, his left, bunched around his shoelaces. And he looked worse than his suit, sick and senile. I placed his age at seventy. Seventy-five.

“Reverend,” he said, extending a dithering, arthritic hand toward Smith, “I took the El all the way from the West Side to hear your speech ’cause I need to tell you somethin’, sir—”

“Not now,” I said. “I’m sorry, old-timer, but we’re a little tired this evening.”

“It’s all right, Bishop.” Smith took the old man’s palsied hand, like the tongue of a worn shoe to the touch, and shook it. “Maybe I can help this gentleman. Your place is on the West Side, right? He can ride in back with me, then you can drop him off. That way he can tell us what’s on his mind …” He winked at me. “It’s what he’d do, right? You can’t turn anybody away.”

When Amy pulled up in the car, the old man bent over and climbed onto the backseat, sandwiching himself between Smith and me, his knees nearly touching his chin as he prepared to state his business and, unbeknownst to us, propel Chaym Smith toward the last stage of his evolution.