Charles Johnson - Dreamer

He shook his head.

“I calls my disability check my husband, it comes on the third,” and she cackled wildly. The staff fell in love with her that day, with her feathery wig that knocked twenty years off her total of seventy-eight, with the way she worked her toothless mouth like a fish while listening to King explain his plans in Chicago, bobbing her head and asking, “Is you, really?” with her head pushed forward, wig askew, and feet planted apart in two shapeless black shoes. She was utterly unselfconscious. Egoless, and flitted round the flat as though she had feet spun from air. Descending like twin trees from her checkered dress were two vein-cabled legs, lumpy in places, bowed, but it was her voice that everyone remembered most. Thinking she might be thirsty, I offered her a soda, which she declined, shaking her head and explaining, “Thank you, dah’ling, I’m tickled, but I bet’ not drink no pop, I might pee on myself.” Her bag was filled with medicine for her heart and high blood pressure, ills of which she was heedless, saying, “Naw, I ain’t supposed to eat salt, but I eats it anyway. I eats any thing.”

In point of fact, Mama Pearl was everybody’s grandmother. “There wasn’t nothin’ I didn’t do in the fields,” she said, speaking of her childhood in southern Illinois. Now she lived on Stony Island in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month walkup with no running water, where she passed her time crocheting (she gave the minister a quilt she’d worked on for two years), “eye-shopping” (as she put it) in downtown stores, and fishing, which was her passion. She’d go with what she called another “senior” or Amy, having her granddaughter lug along a bulging bag of fried chicken, cookies, grapes and peaches, a few ribs, and a thermos. For Mama Pearl fishing was a social event, one to be shared as you ate and talked and played whist. Standing ankle-deep in the water, she’d throw out her line, but was almost too afraid of saltwater worms to slice and bait them (they were hairy and huge and had serrated teeth like a saw). During her afternoon at the flat, she brought forth from her enormous bag three canisters of her own home-cooked raspberry, apricot, and cinnamon rugelach, which she distributed to the entire staff. She inspected everything, involved herself with everyone, including me (“Now, you don’t mind my bein’ nosy, do you, Matthew? I was jes ovah there talkin’ to that light-skinned fellah and he didn’t mind”), and giggled like a young girl, “Ain’t I somethin’?” Before leaving she collected SCLC stationery as souvenirs for the other “seniors” in her church and, waving good-bye at the door, assured us all that “I had a re-e-e-al fine time.”

So had we all, especially King, who kissed her hand as she left (again she giggled), and Amy, who seemed aglow whenever she looked at the grandmother who’d taught her Scripture and how to be a woman, how to crochet, that she could use a string and old tin can for fishing just as easily as a pole and line, and that at all times she must remember others. Yes, she’d taken care of Amy well, raising her — or so I thought — to be as pure in love and self-forgetfulness and service as herself, though Amy at twenty, with her brilliant Dorothy Dandridge smile, was drop-dead beautiful. She did not eat meat. Synthetic fabrics, she said, gave her a rash. She had briefly studied drama and modern dance at Columbia College, where I’d first seen her in the hallways, but then she ran short on funds and took whatever temporary job turned up — short-order cook, dayworker, then watching the Lawndale flat after I’d recommended her for the job.

I had my reasons for that.

Compared with her, I was shy and unsure of myself in everything except my studies. Most of the time feelings banged and knocked through me like something trying to break free from inside. But I screwed up my courage and asked her out to dinner a week after she came to work. Amy thought about my request for a moment, her head cocked to one side, and simply replied, “I don’t eat.” I never had the courage to ask her again.

To avoid her eyes, I turned to the minister, who said, “Well, where is he?”

“I told him to wait outside on the steps,” Amy said, pulling her skirt down a little. “I’ll get him. You two go on back to the kitchen. Matthew, show him the I.D.”

The minister asked, “What I.D.?”

From my shirt pocket I extracted a dog-eared card. “She means this.”

The card I handed over as we walked back down the hallway was an expired Illinois state driver’s license issued to one Chaym Smith, birth date 01/15/29, height 5′7″, weight 180, eyes brown. The minister gazed — and gazed — at the worn license, picking at his lip, and finally looked back at me, poking the card with his finger.

“This could be me!”

“That’s what we thought too,” I said.

“Who is this man?”

“We don’t know.”

“But what does he want with me?”

“Sir,” I said, “maybe he should tell you himself.”

I could see the minister was impatient now for some explanation. Minutes passed. In the kitchen, the wall clock ticked softly beside an Ebony magazine calendar. Food smells, sour and sharp, floated from the sink and an unemptied, paper-lined garbage pail beside it. Then from the front room we could hear the door open. Outside, sirens pierced the hot night air. The neighborhood dogs howled. Through the window, I saw flames from burning cars dancing against a dark sky skirling with tear gas and smoke. The night felt wrong. All of it, as if the riot, the looting and lunacy, breakdown and disorder, had torn space and time, destroying some delicate balance or barrier between dimensions — possible worlds — creating a portal for fantastic creatures to pour through. I could not shake that feeling, and it grew all the stronger when Amy entered the kitchen with the man whose driver’s license I’d handed to King. A man without father or mother, like the priest Melchizedek who mysteriously appeared in the Valley of Siddim after the king of Sodom rebelled against Chedorlaomer.

Stepping back a foot, King whispered, “Sweet Jesus …”

“I thought you’d be interested,” I said.

Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father’s commodious, two-story Queen Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with the black poor. Certainly in every darkened, musty pool hall, on every street corner, in every cramped prison cell he’d passed through, the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith — but never quite like this.

He tore his eyes away, then looked back. Smith was still there, his eyes squinted, the faint smile on his lips one part self-protective irony, two parts sarcasm, as if he carried unsayable secrets (or sins) that, if spoken, would send others running from the room. His workshirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees — he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very embodiment of the blues. Then, as the minister knuckled his eyes, Smith, behind his heavy black eyeglasses, beneath his bushy, matted hair and scraggly beard — as rubicund in tint as Malcolm Little’s — began to look less threatening and more like a poor man down on his luck for a long, long time, one who’d probably not eaten in a week. Neglected like the very building we were in. Everything about him was in disrepair. Just as the city’s administration and the flat’s landlord, a white man named John Bender (who was hardly better off than his tenants), had failed to invest in the crumbling eyesore and allowed it to degenerate into a dilapidated, dangerous public health hazard, so no one, it seemed, had invested in Chaym Smith.