Charles Johnson - Dreamer

On our way back to the Nest that evening my anger at him for making me leave Amy was, strange to say, replaced by an ineffable peace. “Do that form three times in a row every day,” he advised, “and you’ll live longer than that colored ex-cowboy in Texas named Charlie Smith I was reading about.” His promise of longevity made me laugh, but I agreed to do as he asked, for had he not proven himself to be, despite his crabbiness and infuriating eccentricities, an experienced guide for those of us, broken-winged, condemned to mediocrity and the margins of the world? All during the ride back I felt this fraternity with him, but I had no idea I was not alone in my admiration.

As I pulled up the road I saw the green Plymouth parked near the farmhouse and two travel-stained men sitting on our porch as if they owned it.

“Watch yourself,” said Smith. “Let me handle this.”

The older of the two men, gourd-shaped with dull egg-blue eyes behind his thick glasses, his tie tucked under his belt, stood up as we got out of the car and came up the foot-path, scratching the side of his head where he needed a shave. He took off his hat. The movement exposed for a second the shoulder holster inside his wrinkled suitcoat and the butt of a snub-nosed.38.

“Evening, Chaym,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I stayed to one side of Smith, my palms beginning to perspire.

“Evening yourself. You fellahs lost?” Smith’s eyes burned into them. “You’re pretty far off the main road—”

“No, this is where we want to be. My name is Jasper Groat and”—he made a twitchlike nod—“my colleague there is Vincent Withersby. We — say, do you think we could talk inside for a little while?”

“Depends on what you want, Mr. Groat.”

“Oh.” Groat laughed and dipped inside his coat; then his palm displayed a shiny, official-looking badge pinned to his wallet. “That’s simple. We want to talk. To offer you a way to make a little money and maybe help your country out during difficult times. That sound good to you? I certainly hope it does. The people we work for are very … interested … in Martin Luther King. Our director thinks your success impersonating King could, urn, be … useful … for one of the projects we’ve been kicking around the office for a coupla years. Couldn’t find the missing piece, though, till you showed up. Damn, you do look like him, you know? Even behind those dark glasses and that beard. You think we might rest a spell inside, put our feet up, and chat awhile?”

To his left, Withersby was packing enough Dunhill tobacco into his Liverpool pipe to last for an hour. Regardless of what we said, they planned to stay So I slid open the screen door, stepped to one side, and bid them enter.

On the floor of their living room in Atlanta, with the rugs rolled back into a corner and furniture pushed to one side, he was wrestling with his children, pinning Dexter’s arms while Marty, one arm around his neck, rode his hack in an effort to topple him so both boys could get the upper hand. Away to the left in his workroom the phone rang and rang. His wife looked on from the hallway, shaking her head. Can’t you find somewhere else to play with these kids? The tussle, which had gone on for ten minutes of giggling and tickling, was the first good wrestling bout he’d had with the children since they left Chicago; in fact, it was the first time they’d had his undivided attention in weeks, so he was hardly about to stop.

They were happy to he home again, the wretched flat on South Hamlin just a horrible memory now, a place that all summer long drained the gaiety from his children and epressed his wife. No, moving them there was what the Movement required at the time, hut he swore he would never. God willing, subject them to that sort of hardship again. If he regretted anything about his life, it was the way the Cause took such a devastating toll on his personal life and the roles he cherished the most, those of father and husband. Every so often he felt tempted to call his schedule suicide on the installment plan. The crowds and faces ran together. On so many mornings he awoke in a different hotel in a strange city, and for a few bewildering moments he sat up in bed wondering where on earth he might be. And the meals his admirers served him? How they played hob with his waistline! He remembered one in particular — the food itself, not the occasion or his hosts. There was a hundred-year-old bottle from Oporto, lobster on Canton china as thin as a wafer, frittura mista, and pale game served so ingeniously, so artfully, it looked as though each slice had been cut from butter. Yet, if the truth be known, he preferred catfish, pigs’ feet, and collard greens. At least at home now he could relax for a little while and eat whatever he pleased. And, thank God, he didnt have to shave. Daily use of the lye-based depilatory powder his sensitive skin required often left his face tender, smarting and feeling raw, stinging in the outdoor air. But now that they were back in Atlanta, he knew his tortured skin would have a few days to heal.

His children were calling, beckoning him back from his workroom, where he’d finally hurried to answer the phone, to the living room and the makeshift handball court they’d created by pushing back furniture and rolling up the rug. His work space was on the same floor, a back room where his gray metal desk was barricaded in by a file cabinet, a confusion of boxes, shelves loaded down with books, his notes for Where Do We Go from Here? mounds of correspondence, and the phone he held burning against his ear. His hands began to shake as he listened, thinking how when he awoke each morning he could never know what new catastrophe awaited him, what novel, Job-like species of pain hunkered in the shadows, or what manner of crisis, personal or political, he would be put through next. On the other end, as his Marty and Dexter shouted for him to join in their game, the agent in the Atlanta office was reporting almost gleefully the latest bounty the Bureau learned had been placed on his head.

Usually, he suspected, they didn’t call when they discovered someone bent upon killing him. The policy was, he was sure, to simply sit back, wait, and see if the assassin made good on his promise. But this was different. The amount to be collected for killing him was $50,000. “Pretty high, eh?” the agent said. “Bet you didn’t know you were worth that much …”

Even on his best day he didnt believe himself worth that much. Or the staggering smear campaign Hoover launched in 1964, aimed at exposing him, as the director put it, as “the most notorious liar in the country” and removing him from “the national picture.” His agents maintained a two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta’s Peach Street Towers filled with surveillance equipment, and kept a man in the place twenty-four hours a day, monitoring every call he made or received. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’d approved the first wiretaps on his home and offices (though not the fourteen microphone surveillances that came later) after his brother, the president, expressed grave concern over the help the SCLC received from Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell. He remembered that conversation well. Kennedy invited him to the White House and during a stroll in the Rose Garden said, “They’re Communists, you’ve got to get rid of them. If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too — so we’re asking that you be careful.” He’d left that meeting convinced that Hoover’s office, not Kennedy’s, was the center of power in Washington. And that office was determined to see him dead.

Having hung up, having forced himself to say, “Thank you for the information,” he closed his workroom door and slumped onto the chair in front of his desk. Suddenly he felt too tired to play with the children. Too tired to move. The call had washed away all his strength. For an instant he felt dizzy and lowered his head onto a pile of week-old letters begging for his attention. He’d faced death so many times before — the bomb that exploded in Room 30, his room at the Gaston Motel during the Birmingham campaign, flashed through his memories. But this? Oh, this new threat was something else. This plan to kill him had been hatched in Imperial, Missouri, at the home of John Sutherland, who was putting up the money. He was a Virginian, a product of military schools and a descendant of the Pilgrims; he stood firmly against the Movement, so much so that he founded the St. Louis Citizens Council and served in an antiblack organization of businessmen called the Southern States Industrial Council. As the agent told it, Sutherland knew an underworld figure named John Kauffmann, a drug dealer and operator of the Bluff Acres Motel, where stolen cars were dropped off occasionally by nickel-and-dime thugs of his acquaintance. One of them was Russel Byers. His brother-in-law John Paul Spica was serving a murder sentence in the Missouri State Penitentiary, sharing a cell with a penny-ante crook named James Earl Ray. Byers, the agent said, made one of his calls on Kauffmann that fall of 1966, and the motel owner asked him if he’d like to make some money. Sure would, Byers said. Then there’s someone, replied Kauffmann, I think you ought to meet.