These Dreams of You

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He faces down protesters who claim to base their views on Judeo-Christian beliefs by asking how they can be certain God isn’t black. He walks through black villages and the immense crowd doubles, triples, multiplies in what seems unquantifiable exponents; he shakes every black hand that never before has been offered a white hand that didn’t have in it a stick.

Each rally becomes so large as to leak into the next until it’s as if the entire country is a rally. For everyone who sees him, the astonishing courage of the small shaking man with the limp handshake who said to Reg, “People think I’m afraid of nothing when the truth is I’m afraid of everything,” has about it the force of revelation. “We felt small and meaningless,” the article quotes one of the student leaders, a young woman Jasmine’s age, “and he’s the only man to come tell us we’re not alone. He has reset the moral compass.”

Over the next year, pursuing her studies in London and continuing to work for the record company, she keeps the Times article as it makes its folded way from one textbook to the next.