Charles Johnson - Dreamer

Smith had finished stretching. He scooted back from the spot where he’d been sitting and rested his back against a tree.

“What I’m saying is that my practice was correct. So good the Roshi promoted me to kitchen chef or tenzo . That’s an honor, right? It means I’d been diligent. He put me in charge of preparing food to sustain the Sangha, and I was ’bout the only one the Old Man, the Roshi, didn’t whack with his bamboo stick when time came for him to interview me ’bout my koan .

“It was great,” Smith said. Then, sourly, “For a year.”

“What happened? Why’d you leave?”

“Didn’t want to.” He laughed. “I felt like I was in Shangri-la. I coulda stayed there forever. But one year to the very day I started, one of the priests said the Roshi wanted to see me. I was in the kitchen, making a sauce to go with wheat-paste noodles. Lemme tell you, it was good . Li’l sea tangle, sesame seeds, ginger, chopped green onions, and grated radishes. I washed my hands, then hurried to the Roshi’s room. I struck the umpan, the gong, to let him know I’d arrived, then entered when he called. I knelt before him, never lifting my eyes, but I wondered fiercely why he wanted to see me. Had I done wrong? No, he told me. My practice was perfect. The other monks respected me. But (he said) I was a gaijin . A foreigner. Only a Japanese could experience true enlightenment. That’s what he said. He didn’t want me to waste my time. He was being compassionate — see? — or thought he was. I left that night, Bishop. If anything, my year in the temple taught me what Gautama figured out when he broke away from the holy men: if you want liberation, to be free, you got to get there on your own. All the texts and teachers are just tools. If you want to be free, you’re supposed to outgrow them.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t feel sorry. There’s no place anywhere for me. I seen that a long time ago. Wherever I go, I’m a nigger. Oh, and I been to mother Africa. Over there, where people looked like me, I didn’t fit either. I don’t belong to a tribe. To them I was an American, a black one, and that meant I didn’t belong anywhere.” He patted his pants and shirt, searching for his cigarettes. Having found the pack in his breast pocket, Smith lit one with a Zippo lighter, and blew a smoke ring my way. Then quietly he asked, “What about you? Do you feel at home— really at home — anywhere?”

“No.” I thought of my blundering pass earlier in the farmhouse. “I don’t. Ever …”

“Then you’re damned too,” Smith said. “You got the mark. That’s what I seen on you. Outcasts know each other. The blessed know us too, and keep their distance, and I can’t say I blame ’em. We scare ’em. We make ’em uncomfortable. We’re the unwanted, the ones always passed over. Until the day we die, we’re drifters. Won’t no place feel right for long. And that’s okay. I accept that. Hell, I embrace it. My spirit don’t ever have to be still. It don’t need to sleep. Fuck that. The only thing is, I don’t want to be forgotten. Not by the goddamn sheep. Or God. I want to do something to make Him remember this nigger— me —for eternity.

Then Smith was quiet for a while, staring past me toward the lights of the farmhouse, and something in me quieted as well. He was a man without a home. Without a race. I pitied him and myself, for what he’d said about knowing no place on earth where he could find peace and security was something I’d often felt and feared, and perhaps that was even why I wanted — or believed I wanted — Amy. Now I feared it less, and for the first time since Chaym Smith surfaced during the Chicago riots, I understood the labyrinthal depths of his (our) suffering. Or did I? Hadn’t he said all stories were lies? What, then, was I to make of the one he’d just told me? It had seduced me, but as always I didn’t exactly know where truth ended and make-believe began with him.

“What will you do?” I asked. “Doc told us to help you—”

“Help me, then.” He got to his feet, brushing grass off the seat of his britches. “Best thing you and the girl can do is teach me what I don’t know about Dr. King.” His smile gleamed in the moonlight, followed by that maddening, ticlike wink. “Do that, and I’ll take care of everything else.”

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.