Charles Johnson - Dreamer

The sacrifices I made for the Movement …

“Matthew?”

“Okay, I’m going .”

By late afternoon, I was back in Makanda, cursing Smith as I climbed the steps to the farmhouse. He was nowhere to be seen, so I drove to Rev. Littlewood’s church, wondering if something evil had befallen him, which is what I’d deliciously imagined during the long drive, but now I was worried and feeling guilty that I’d left him when so many people wanted King dead and might mistake Smith for the minister. It was a Friday. The church was vacant. I used one of the keys Rev. Littlewood had given us when we started work on Bethel to let myself in. I looked to no avail for Smith but noticed something else. Portions of the church dated from different periods, like a palimpsest, reaching back to the end of the Civil War when black couples separated by slavery held mass weddings on this very site, as many as a hundred men and women gathering to exchange wedding vows and have their long-deferred unions sanctified and cemented by the Christian faith.

The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, the African, the Roman, the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experience of the spirit. On either side of the entrance were two cracked stained-glass windows of intersecting tracery, the mullions of each branching out into curved bars, below them smooth masonry with chamfered edges. Under the direction of the church’s first pastor, the congregation finished the church’s foyer and stairs leading up to the sanctuary, but it fell to the next generation to complete the choir stand and the storeroom where wooden crates containing the church’s archives — tithings, mimeograph copies of a weekly newsletter, and records on christenings, funerals, and donations — were stacked almost to the ceiling; then it fell to a third generation to raise additional rooms in the rear for special meetings. In the original braces strengthening the frame of the roof, in the quoins at the church’s four corners, in the small choir section to the left of the pulpit, added during the 1920s by parishioners whose names were now lost, I saw a creation that on every level — from purlins to wallplates — transcended the passing of its founders, one that no single generation could live to see completed and thus was handed down and on to those yet unborn for its continual restoration and completion.

From this ground of blended anonymous lives, many a world-acclaimed king might arise.

Where I fit into this sanctuary so heavy with black history, I could not say. Before returning to Chicago I’d simply fit myself behind a wheelbarrow, hauling away debris as Smith cleaned and polished the pews, doing and redoing the architrave and shutting stile with a painstaking care I found as hard to fathom as his spontaneous act of volunteering first as a caretaker, then helping to finish the additions left undone, and at last, just as I was leaving, offering to teach one of the Sunday-school classes for Rev. Littlewood, explaining Old Testament stories to Bethel’s wide-eyed children with the skill that only a natural thespian could bring. He told me he planned to act out the tales, taking the parts of Noah and Job and others; he especially enjoyed the opportunity to play a fickle Jehovah with a cruel streak in Him. I knew — just knew —the children would love it. I imagined them cheering during his classes. He even talked about possibly directing the children in biblical plays of their own. But, I wondered, why this sacrifice for a community in which he believed himself an outcast?

The answer and Chaym were waiting for me in the church’s storeroom. I found him cleaning up after a day of painting, for which he was miserably paid, scrubbing turpentine-soaked rags on his trousers, shirt, and portions of his face splattered with Optic White. Looking up, he saw me and winked.

I asked, “You like what you see?”

“Hey now, that’s my line, Bishop. You get your own. But, yeah, I do like what I see. That big Cheshire cat grin means you musta got some trim in Chicago. That’s good. Keep at it, and those pimples on your face might clear up.”

“Watch how you talk about Amy. I was there when you called her. The only reason I’m back here so soon is because she was worried about you.”

“About me? Worried, eh?”

“Yes, I know it sounds strange—”

“Hell, I’m all right. I just got my hands on a li’l gorilla dust last night and thought I saw somethin’ outside. Wasn’t nobody there when I looked again. But I’m straight today, and I am glad to see your ass. You can help me move some of these paint cans upstairs.”

“Uh-uh, no ! I’ve done enough work here, and I don’t know why you’re doing it. Did you get religion or something after you got shot?”

“Naw, Bishop,” he said as he leaned back, resting his arms on the bench. “I don’t believe in a blessed thing, including me. I’ll never be one of the faithful. It’s just that I figure work is all I got to offer, even if the ground we till gives back nothing. It don’t matter. I ain’t worried ’bout it bein’ fair. For a li’l while what I do here is just what I’m doin’ and, who knows, it may be beautiful, and maybe nobody won’t know ’bout it, even God, but for a second or two it’ll make a few of the folks who come through here on Sunday happy. I don’t ’spect much more’n that anymore.” He stared as I rubbed my lower back. “What’s the matter? You feel stiff?”

“Some. I just drove for over six hours. Remember?”

“Got just the thing for you. Come with me.”

Smith led me from the storeroom to the platform on which Rev. Littlewood’s pulpit sat. He pushed it back to widen the space where we stood, then spread his feet shoulder width. Closed his eyes. Tucked in his tail, slowly raised his arms chest high, and said, “Do like I’m doing. Keep it slow. Don’t stop. Just flow.”

“I’ve seen this on TV. All those Chinese you see in the park every morning in Peking do this, right?”

“Wrong.” He kept moving, flowing through postures, his weight never equally distributed on both feet. “What they’re doing is a lie, like most things. The Communists under Mao have outlawed all the old, traditional martial arts ’cause they can’t control them, or the genius of those venerable old kung fu masters. But people are practicin’ in secret anyway. So the government concocted the form you seen on TV so the practitioners would have to do it out in the open at the parks — where the government can watch the herd and take names — since that form requires lots of room. What I’m showing you is the real thing done by monks at the Shaolin monastery. You can do it in a shower stall if you adjust your footwork. It don’t take up no more room than that. When you do it, do it riabroi .”

“Huh?”

“Oh, sorry. That’s a Thai word. There’s no English equivalent. I picked it up in Chiang Mai. It’s yours. I’ma give it to you. Riabroi means everything together at once, complete, sensible, beautiful, perfect, and natural. You do this form — or anythin’ else— riabroi and you won’t need me lookin’ after you no more.”

“Looking after me? I’m the one Doc told to—”

“Bishop, shut up and do the form.”

I followed his lead, letting him teach me the twenty-four moves of the (Yang) Tai Chi Chuan form he’d picked up while traveling overseas, making myself slow down more with each posture, each breath, wasting no motion whatsoever, and as I mimicked his movements I began to feel lighter and less fatigued — like water, like wind — though I’m sure if Rev. Littlewood had entered Bethel AME just then, he would have found it puzzling to see two black men, both refugees of the American race wars, doing Taoist-drenched Tai Chi in the Christian sanctuary where generations of right and proper Griffiths had prayed to a god unknown to either Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu.