LUTHER AND THELMA SAT WAITING ON THE STEPS OF MARTIN Luther King’s old church, Dexter Avenue Baptist. They had been there for a few hours now, having arrived in Montgomery just as daylight did. Luther had parked in a colored neighborhood—he could tell because the street was unpaved—and they had walked downtown following a service station map.
“Let’s sit here,” he had announced when they stood before the red brick building with twin staircases curving up from the sidewalk.
“Yes, massa,” Thelma replied.
He had sighed, knowing this meant his sister was still upset with him for the way he had treated her the last few days—like a child, to hear her tell it. But all he had done was remove from the house every razor, knife, scissors, and screwdriver he owned. And move his pistol to his locked desk down in the barbershop. And flush all his sleeping pills, pain pills, and blood pressure medication. And forbid her to be alone, requiring her to sit with him all day in the shop.
“Luther, this is crazy,” she had told him Tuesday night. “I already promised you I would take the doctor’s advice and talk to someone when I get home. And besides, if a person really wants to hurt themselves, you can’t stop them, no matter how many knives or pills you get rid of. Hell, I could just as easily hang myself. Did you ever think of that?”
So he had taken her bedsheets.
They had spoken hardly an extraneous word since. Now the siblings sat in silence on one of the staircases serving the church, which stood almost literally in the shadow of the Alabama capitol. George had called from a phone booth the night before to say he and Adam would meet them here after the march.
The street, which had been dark and quiet in the predawn hours when they arrived, had grown steadily more crowded in the hours since then, and Luther was pleased with himself for getting there early enough to secure a good vantage point from which to watch the speech. Security was tight, intersections blocked by military Jeeps and sawhorses, the sidewalks by panels of plywood, to prevent anyone from leaping into the street. Soldiers patrolled the area, eyeing everything and everyone with suspicion. The serious, clean-shaven men with helmets pulled low and rifles slung across their backs seemed so young, almost like boys playing soldier. Luther knew that simply reflected the fact that he himself was getting old.
Just then, he heard a man on the radio announce that the march, officially scheduled to arrive at the statehouse by noon, was more likely to get there an hour or two later. CP time, he thought, shaking his head and checking his watch. He reached into the backpack he had brought with him, producing a bologna-and-cheese sandwich and a can of Coca-Cola. He offered both to Thelma along with his can opener. She accepted them after a moment’s hesitation. “Thank you,” she said.
Luther nodded. “Welcome,” he said, hoping her civil response signaled a truce of some sort. He got a sandwich and a can of soda pop for himself. He was eager to get this over with, to hear the speech, to say goodbye to his family, and begin the journey home. Luther had never had much use for the civil rights movement. Or for its leader.
There was nothing personal in his disdain for King. Unlike Malcolm X, who had often seemed to take wicked delight in personally demeaning him, Luther thought the preacher was a decent enough man—even a brave one. But King spoke a language to which Luther Hayes had no access and in which he had no interest. It wasn’t just that he wove Biblical allusions through his words while Luther had lost God the same night he lost his parents.
It was also because so much of King’s approach lay in appealing to white people’s conscience and Luther wasn’t at all sure most of them even had one. So he had little patience for King’s so-called “dream,” which, as near as he could tell from excerpts of the 1963 speech that he had seen on television and read in the newspaper, had to do with some promised land beyond race where black children and white children would be brothers and sisters, where the color of their skin would have no bearing on the way his own “four little children” would be received, and where Southern governors would reform themselves and their societies out of the habit of violence—physical, mental, social, economic—against colored people. It was, King seemed to believe, a vision that would come true if only Negroes pleaded hard enough for it, if they marched on muddy roads and carried signs for it, if they pointed out like it was news a fact that had been plainly obvious for almost two hundred years. Namely, that America was a glaring hypocrisy, an ongoing failure to be, or even try to be, what it said it was.
Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing?
All men are created equal?
With liberty and justice for all?
What nonsensical bullshit.
He cast a covert glance at his sister, beaten, raped, emotionally brutalized to the point of suicide by white men, sitting there now sipping soda pop, and he felt his chest grow tight.
There was no dream. This, Luther Hayes knew with a certainty. There was only the nightmare that, for colored people, had begun on a beach in Virginia in 1619 and showed no signs of ending. That was America.
It had always made Johan cringe when he said things like that. The old man believed in this country with a kind of hopeless devotion Luther supposed was only natural for an immigrant who had been taken in from a storm-tossed sea.
“America is no nightmare,” Johan had scolded him once as Luther was snipping his dark, wiry hair. “Why would you say such a thing?” Johan’s Negro driver, Benjamin, had been sitting in the next chair, where Smitty was giving him a trim. He and Luther shared a sidelong glance.
Then Luther said, “We ain’t all come here by choice, Johan.”
“Of course not,” said Johan. “I know this.”
“All right, then,” said Luther. “So you know some of us ain’t never seen no liberty and justice for all. This country been hypocritical from jump street.”
“You tell him, brother!” piped up a man who sat waiting his turn beneath a shelf where the radio was crooning “Only You (And You Alone)” by the Platters.
“Hypocritical, yes,” conceded Johan, his tone turning lawyerly. “But hypocrisy does not preclude hope. And that is good, because without hope, we are dead. Without hope, what is the point?”
“Hope,” said Luther. He had chuckled. “That’s an easy word to say, old man. At least it is when you can look around you and actually see shit gettin’ better. But that ain’t never been the case for Negroes.”
“It will be,” Johan had promised.
“Really? How long will it take?” Luther had demanded, his hands working fast, his eyes meeting those of a man in the corner whom he knew to be just two months removed from the chain gang. The man was following their conversation with unfathomable eyes. “You come here as a boy,” Luther continued, “and you worked hard and you made yourself rich. And that’s great. But you think it’s that same way for everybody. You think we all have that same opportunity, and we don’t. Me and mine, we been waitin’ a long time.”
“I know we don’t all have the same opportunity,” Johan said. “I’m not foolish, Luther. But what I’m saying is, it will come.”
“How long?” demanded Luther again.
“You ask me to put a time limit on it? I can’t do that. I can’t read the future. But what I can say is that it will happen. America is a land of constant reinvention. It is an ongoing revolution. Here is where a boy can arrive, as you said, penniless and unable to speak the language and through hard work, perseverance, and luck, make something useful of himself. It is also where men like your own Dr. Ralph Bunche can grow up from nothing to win a Nobel Prize or, like Joe Louis, become the heavyweight champion of the world. Only here are such things possible.”
The man in the corner had given a dismissive snort at Johan’s passionate monologue and lifted a magazine to his eyes. Luther had laughed again. “He don’t mean no harm,” he explained.
Johan had surprised them all by addressing the skeptical man directly. “You, sir, in the corner. He’s right. I mean no disrespect. I understand that you are impatient, that every colored man is impatient for this country to finally treat him like a man, and I don’t blame you, not a bit. All I am saying is, don’t give up on your country. Prod it to do better, to live up to its high ideal of all men being equal. The ideal is a good one. It is the people who are not so good, who refuse to live up to what they claim to believe. And they must not be allowed to get away with it. America belongs to you as much as it does to me. It is still the greatest country in the world.”
The other man’s mouth had sprung open for a sharp retort. Luther had cut him off. “Let’s talk about somethin’ else,” he said.
Benjamin had piped up helpfully, “Do you all think Brooklyn is going to finally win the Series this year? Jackie gettin’ a little long in the tooth. Not going to have many more chances.”
The other man had scowled, but he didn’t push it. The talk turned to baseball. And the moment passed.
But Luther had always remembered that particular exchange in late August of 1955 because of what happened the next time he saw Johan, two weeks later. The whole world had changed by then—certainly the whole Negro world—and when he spotted through the window Johan’s Packard sitting in traffic, waiting to turn into the alley, Luther heaved a heavy sigh. He supposed he ought to not be surprised to see him appearing at the shop just as if everything was the same as before. Johan was a good man, but he was a good white man, which meant he would always be a little oblivious.
“I see your friend is here,” muttered Smitty from the next chair over as the car swung left into the alley.
Wearily, Luther had nodded. “Wish he had gone somewhere else,” he said. “Just this one time.”
Instead, the bell over the door in back jangled a moment later and Johan walked in as he always did, Benjamin trailing behind looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else. Luther could see in Johan’s eyes that he knew instantly something was wrong. He’d have been a fool not to. A leaden pall had fallen on Youngblood’s Barbershop these last few days and it remained there today. Count Basie was not playing on the radio. No one was crowing over a checkmate or slamming down a domino.
Instead, they trained their eyes on the white man like machine guns, tracked him as he walked to a seat. With a hesitant smile, Johan nodded to faces he knew. No one nodded back.
Years ago, when Johan had started coming here for his haircuts, there had been some grumbling among the regulars about what this overdressed white man was doing here in their place on their side of town. Wasn’t it bad enough they had to deal with honkies everywhere else? Did one have to follow them into the barbershop, too?
But they all knew Luther liked him, was even related to him by marriage, so nobody made too much of a fuss. It was Luther’s shop, after all, and besides, the old white man seemed harmless enough in an old white man kind of way. After a time, he had become a regular himself, which is to say, just another piece of the furniture, just something else you expected to see when you went down to Youngblood’s for a trim.
But this day in September of 1955 was different. Luther had watched Johan take a wary seat, turning his hat in his hand and stealing sidelong glances at the unfriendly faces studying him, not quite sure what was going on. Luther couldn’t help it. He felt sorry for him.
“Give me a minute,” he told the man whose hair he was cutting.
Luther was conscious of the whole shop watching as he came out from behind the chair, but he ignored the stares as best he could. Wiping his hands on his barber’s smock, he stopped at a table cluttered with an unruly assortment of magazines—Ebony, Time, Newsweek—and plucked a small one off the top. It was called Jet and it carried a black-and-white cover photo of a pretty Negro girl in a bathing suit and a headline promising “Strange Facts About the Moore-Marciano Fight.” But no one who bought that particular magazine cared about Archie Moore and Rocky Marciano. Luther opened it to a page he knew by heart and approached Johan.
The old man looked up at him. “This is about that boy, isn’t it?”
Luther didn’t reply. He just placed the open magazine on Johan’s lap and let the picture do the talking. It depicted the body of Emmett Louis Till. But what had once been a cheerful, prankish teenager had been hammered and gouged and battered and crushed, then dumped like garbage into a river, so that all that was left was this dead and bloated lump captured by the camera, this blasphemous obscenity in white shirt and dark jacket, this mangled, once-human thing upon which had been visited like the biblical scapegoat all the hatred, fury, and fear of the white race entire.
“Istenem.” Johan spoke in a voice soft with horror.
“Yeah,” said Luther, his own voice weary, “istenem.” It was something his friend said when he was truly stunned, a word in his native Hungarian that meant, “My God.”
“So maybe,” said Luther carefully after a moment, “this ain’t the best place for you to get your trim right now. Maybe you should go somewhere else. Just for today, you know what I’m sayin’?”
It took a long moment for the old man to answer, and Luther knew he was still processing the awful image. Finally, he nodded dumbly. “I’m sorry,” he said, coming stiffly to his feet. “You’re right, of course. I should have thought of it myself.”
He surveyed the room as if there was something he wanted to say to the men watching him so closely. To Luther, he looked suddenly haggard, even older than his then-seventy-one years. His mouth hung open, but no words came out. He turned the homburg twice in his hands. Finally, he put it back on his head and nodded to Benjamin, who followed him toward the rear door. At the last moment, the driver turned, and his eyes found Luther’s. There was something inexpressibly sad in his gaze. “Tried to tell him it was a bad idea,” he said, as if by way of apology. And then both men were gone.
It was almost Christmas before Luther next saw Johan. That was when Johan showed him the note he had sent the dead boy’s grieving mother.
He and Luther had never again debated American dreams.
Ten years later, his friend was sinking slowly into himself, disappearing into his own mind bit by bit, like a sandcastle in the encroaching tide. And here Luther was, sitting on church house steps, waiting for Martin Luther King to talk to him about dreams.
Dreams.
It had been only a few days since he had discovered the man who killed his parents alive if not quite well in a nursing home. Only a few days since he’d found himself weeping like a baby into the same soil that drank their blood. Only a few days since he’d seen his nephew beaten and swollen-eyed in jail for telling white men the truth. Only a few days since his sister had had to fall to her knees and kiss a white man’s hand while he, her big brother and protector, had helplessly, impotently watched. Only a few days since Thelma had tried to kill herself.
So Luther Hayes was unimpressed by dreams. Yet for all his skepticism, he was also aware of a deep hunger in him to be proven wrong. Indeed, he sat there in a kind of quiet desperation, willing Martin Luther King—needing Martin Luther King—to speak to his anger and despair, to provide some sort of safety valve to bleed off the steam pressure of a rage that made his chest ache.
The drumming of helicopter blades overhead broke Luther’s reverie. He glanced up in time to see the aircraft swoop low over George Wallace’s house before banking south. A truck with the logo of one of the three television networks lumbered down Decatur and parked at the barricade. Looking down the sidewalk, he saw clusters of spectators, most of them colored, forming behind the barricades. There were still hours left to go, but the signs were unmistakable.
The dreamer was on his way.