These Dreams of You

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All of the versions of him lie there on the bed and then she hears one of them in the room’s fading light. “The pain. The pain that can’t forget,” he says, “must find a way to rain forgiveness on the heart until there grows a wisdom and grace as close to God’s as we can manage. The Negro in this country understands the country’s promise better than anyone because he’s felt its betrayal. I don’t have the right to ask them to believe me. No white politician does. Six years ago when I was Attorney General and the Freedom Riders took their buses into Alabama and they were beaten and hosed down and run down by dogs and they asked me to protect them, I just wanted them to stop making trouble. Just stop, I said. You’re making trouble! Don’t be in a hurry! That seems a different life now. That man. . seems a different man, or I hope he is, anyway. So many times in this country, faith has been asked of the children of slaves to only dishonest and treacherous ends. The children of slaves took a leap of faith six years ago out on that Mall in the shadow of our most haunting memorial and now, now that he’s been shot down, we ask them to take another leap. If it’s true that the promise of this country can’t be kept until white begs the forgiveness of black, it’s as true that the promise can’t be kept until the black man decides whether to extend that forgiveness — and slavery’s child is under no obligation to do that. In our hearts on which rains the pain that we can’t forget, we know that. Who knows how such a thing can happen, the request for forgiveness and the granting of it? What historic moment can represent that? A black man or woman someday running, perhaps, for the office that I run for now? But we can’t tell the slave’s child whether to forgive. We can’t pretend it’s incumbent on blacks to do that. One more time the fate of the country and its meaning is in the same black hands that built the White House, the same hearts broken in the country’s name. We’ll be only as good a country as the black man and woman and child allows and only as redeemed as black allows white to redeem itself. But the slave’s child owes no one that redemption.”

All the versions of him collapsing into his exhausted frame, he says, “I know it could have been me. Everyone knows that. No one knows it better than I. Perhaps if it were, it would have mattered as much, perhaps not. Perhaps it would have been better.”

“Don’t,” she whispers.

“I don’t know how much time I have,” he says, “to become the person that I hope I am.”