It had been a hot day, but the air felt much cooler now as the sun began to set. It was the warm humid air of Memphis, emanating from the soaked ground and vegetation after the storm of the night before. There was a sudden perfection in his surroundings, a levity, a sweetness; it was something present and tangible and at the same time a promise; a certainty and a soothing sense of distance from it all.
He had noticed it only a few minutes ago, by surprise, when he came out to the balcony, securing his cuff links. He realized that for the first time that entire day he was breathing fresh air, and leaving the excessive refrigeration of the Lorraine. He was surprised by the warm touch of the breeze coming from the river, invisible and nearby, just beyond the rooftops of South Main, the walls surrounding abandoned sites, the collapse of the inner city in America, the crumbling neighborhoods where only the poor and black lived, the most trapped, the ones who ran to touch him as if he had stepped right out of the Gospel, hoping for some kind of miraculous cure; but also the ones who did not come, the ones who kept their distance, numbed by misery or alcohol or heroin, and the ones who now viewed him with suspicion, even hatred, no longer a brother, but a traitor, a sellout to the white man.
He had come out to the balcony because the smell of his shaving cream was too strong, almost repulsive, a running joke among his friends. He had applied the cream in front of the bathroom mirror, while Abernathy asked him to please close the bathroom door and crack open a window.
He also found the smell repugnant, almost as much as the feeling of that sticky substance on his skin, which was very sensitive and would get easily irritated if he used a regular razor blade. He cut the thin mustache very carefully. It was his secret flirtation, although he knew that it was now an outdated style, that it belonged to a time of ten or fifteen years ago, just like the hats that he still liked to wear. Nowadays all the men wore big mustaches and long sideburns, and almost nobody wanted to use a hat. Life can change rapidly around you and you won’t even notice if you don’t look up from your routine.
He washed his face with cold water and slapped on the aftershave. The clean ironed shirt was pleasant to the touch. He buttoned it halfway and went out to the balcony to get fresh air. He had plenty of time. They were going to a dinner with friends, nothing formal like those dinners in New York and Washington, which still made him nervous after all these years. It would be a simple feast, hearty food, and then some music, an event to honor the sanitation workers who were striking. He always asked Abernathy to do things he’d rather not do; this time, just a while ago, he had asked him to call the host of the dinner, Mrs. Kyles, to confirm that the menu did not have any strange dishes, any French sauces or steamed vegetables or pureed spinach with the consistency of his shaving cream. Eating and drinking with friends is one of life’s great pleasures. For the Greeks, a feast was a banquet of love, the maximum expression of human harmony, the sweet intoxication of flesh and spirit.
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, says Ecclesiastes. He likes southern food, the plentiful servings of the restaurants in Memphis, fried catfish, barbecued ribs, smoked pork, pig’s feet, sweet tea with ice, frosty cold beer, black beans and rice and creamy sweet potatoes, all the glory of God’s creation.
* * *
It was a good sign to be thinking about food, to have an appetite again after so many days of darkness, the enormous and probably doomed effort of putting together the biggest march the world has seen, like the people of Israel marching toward the Promised Land, the great universal march of the poor to Washington, not just his people, because poverty and injustice are color-blind, but also Native American tribes, day laborers, immigrants, the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem in New York, the Eskimos, the native Hawaiians, the white poor of Appalachia.
He and Abernathy had shared a big tray of fried catfish for lunch. The waiter of the Lorraine had made a mistake and brought just one huge plate. They almost preferred it that way. Like David and Jonathan, they had shared everything for many years. They were closer than brothers. There was no point in waiting for the extra plates or cutlery. They dug in with their hands and ate and talked and laughed; they even took the tray to the bedroom, where they continued eating and joking and even throwing food and napkins at each other.
The bedroom was a mess. Twenty-four hours since their arrival and the ashtrays had already overflowed; there were newspapers all over the floor and the beds, along with reports and drafts of sermons, beer bottles, the bottle of whiskey they had started the night before, a lone ice cube floating in a glass of lukewarm water.
* * *
Depression was a sin because it made you indifferent to the gifts of God, resentful against them. In those moments, the lines from Ecclesiastes would come to him as clearly as if someone were whispering them into his ear. Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Now that he was emerging from the darkness, he could see just how deep he had fallen in a secret and vindictive disappointment with everything and anger at himself. I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.
While shaving, he had been able to look at himself in the mirror without shame, without seeing the face of an impostor, a sinner consumed by forbidden desires, the libertine who was the target of gossip and blackmailing by his enemies, the FBI agents who right now were probably sitting in an unmarked van nearby listening to the microphones they had planted in his room.
A sense of immunity to guilt and danger had filled him since the night before and it felt even stronger now. He was thankful for this inner calm because he knew how fragile it was.
As he exited onto the balcony, he felt the curtains and the breeze on his face, the stillness that filled that hour in these parts of Memphis, after people had left the factories for the day and were home getting ready for dinner. It was the sound of the daily sigh of relief in these fatigued lives. Faint sounds of ship sirens came from the invisible river. He remembered that mysterious passage in Genesis where God is walking in the garden in the cool of the day. He placed both hands on the railing. The metal still contained the heat of the day.
The sun had yet to set beyond the forests of Arkansas, on the other side of the river, but it was no longer within view from the balcony, only its golden shadow was visible across the sky, slowly backlighting the row of buildings to the west. Time had slowed down just for those few moments, still without haste, before they called him from the parking lot and said it was time to go. It felt good to step out of the constant urgency to get somewhere, a meeting, a dinner, a march, an interview, a plane.
For thirteen years, his entire adult life, he had lived like that, always in a hurry, each time with less energy and increasingly trapped by the anguish of obligations, the crowds who spent hours in the heat, waiting for his arrival to their church; the possible donors and powerful benefactors who should never have to wait; his own children and his wife in the family home where he barely had time to stop nowadays; the production assistants at the TV studios who were always rushing him through some backstage.
The more conscious he felt of his strength leaving him, the more daunting the task ahead, the more cruel the injustice, the more unlikely his success. In other times, when he was younger, everything had seemed possible. Now, unexpectedly, he was enjoying these few minutes in a parenthesis of calm. It was a gift, as tangible as the solid warmth of the metal under his hands or the way the clean shirt felt on his skin.
He went back to the room, flooded with the red glow of the afternoon and its lengthening shadows. He buttoned up the rest of the shirt. The last button gave him some difficulty. He had started to gain weight recently, and it was not for the pleasures of food and drink, but something darker. He lacked joy. He was eating from stress, drinking to appease his anguish, smoking until his lungs hurt, and waking up every morning in a hotel room that smelled of cigarettes, not knowing where he was, because all the rooms had started to look the same.
He fixed his tie, noticing the pressure of the shirt collar on his chin. He liked the feel of silk on his hands.
There were people in the movement, fervent fighters, who surrendered to asceticism as a perpetual penance, as if any delight was a frivolity, a betrayal to the cause of the oppressed. They would have liked to wear camel hair, like John the Baptist, with a leather belt around their waists. But Jesus Christ, on the very eve of the Passion, had thanked a woman in Bethany for pouring on his head an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and admonished the disciples, who had complained about wasting it when it could have been sold for money to help the poor.
He loved good cologne, the subtle blend of perfumes that emanated from attractive women, the elegance of high heels. He put his jacket on, delighted by the skill of the tailor who had known how to fit the suit to his new heft in a flattering way. People who met him for the first time were always surprised to see he wasn’t tall.
He folded the linen handkerchief and slipped it into the breast pocket of the jacket, forming a small triangle. The black shoes were clean because he had not left the hotel all day, but he still gave them a quick polish. They were the elegant shoes of Sunday sermons and receptions, not the comfortable, rubber-soled ones of marches under the sun. Perhaps he had time to smoke a cigarette on the balcony, while Abernathy went back to the room to put on deodorant or cologne. Abernathy always scolded him when they were running late but he was the one who was always remembering things at the last minute and causing delay.
* * *
It was amazing that people could remain the same. It was good that way. To feel that you know a friend so well that you can predict his actions, that the good things happen according to a preexisting order, following the person’s nature, like Genesis says, the particular and even whimsical nature of every creature. If he had to wait for Abernathy, he might as well do so on the balcony with a cigarette. He anticipated that small and guaranteed pleasure.
Below, around the cars, friends joked around and lit one another’s cigarettes, playing pretend-fight, throwing hooks in the air and laughing. They wore dark suits, thin black ties, and hats and had an air of jazzmen and professors, which he liked, because it balanced out the propensity of Baptist pastors to look like funeral directors.
Jesse Jackson stood out with his leather jacket and turtleneck. But that was also according to his nature, and this time it did not annoy him. Jackson was younger, of course, though not as much as his style made him seem. That was the style of the day: to exhibit one’s youth without shame and celebrate it, almost boastfully, imitating the jargon of pimps and drug dealers.
To be thirty-nine years old made you an old man and, according to some, inevitably reactionary. So solemn, with his “Dr.” title always in front of the name, his Nobel Prize, his old-fashioned rhetoric. But beneath his tolerance for Jackson remained a sting of suspicion and that made him feel disloyal and ashamed of himself. He had never wished nor asked to be put on a pedestal, but they did it anyway; they elevated him to this earthly sainthood and then disowned him for not living up to their impossible expectations. They had turned him into a heroic statue only to throw stones at it. Shame was one of his most assiduous secret afflictions, throbbing deeper than the weight of his obligations, fed by the tension of public life, the gap between what others chose to see in him and who he really was. There is no public figure who is not an impostor.
Perhaps Judas Iscariot stood out among the other apostles; something made them mistrust him without a clear reason, and it was this unwarranted suspicion that pushed him to a place he would not have gone otherwise. But Jackson was not a traitor: he was just ambitious, anxious, impatient, and frustrated—as any veteran of the struggle would be—by the slow pace of change and the persistence of injustice. Perhaps he secretly wanted to put on a black jacket and a beret, wield a pistol or a rifle, and raise his clenched fist.
But Jackson also cared about being part of this circle of veterans of the struggle. Hadn’t he forced a situation that afternoon in order to get invited? Just a while earlier he had told him, not entirely in jest, that he should wear a suit and a tie to visit the home of Reverend Kyles. Jackson quickly responded that the only requirement for going to someone’s house for dinner is a good appetite. Now he was watching him from the balcony, the young man, strong, anxious, trying hard to joke with the others. He felt shame that he could not get over his unfounded suspicions despite the visible evidence of Jackson’s love.
* * *
He could recognize all of them, match every voice with a name and a face, histories that went back to the beginning. But there was a voice that in his mind stood out more than all the others precisely because of its absence; a presence even more special because it was hidden, invisible yet so close to him. She was also waiting for the signal that it was time to go, and when that happened she would come out and get in the last car at the last minute, slipping out of a room on the ground floor, the room where she had been since the night before, when she arrived, exhausted but happy after the ten-hour journey, her lips freshly painted.
She had gotten used to making herself invisible, waiting for him in hotel rooms that were never under his name or apartments that belonged to people unknown to her. They could be photographed together from afar. Surely there were policemen with binoculars watching from a window or terrace in some building nearby. There could be microphones in the room, perhaps in the lamp on the bedside table, or behind the headboard. They don’t bother protecting us from our enemies but they sure can keep a close watch on us, she had said, one of the first times, in another one of those secret meetings that always took place in the exact same way but were never immune to unleashed desire, the unbearable intensity of the wait, the gentle knock on the door at a late hour, the precious time between hello and goodbye, so short there was barely any time for a prelude, or the pleasant rest that came afterward, a cigarette in bed, the prolonged satisfaction of quenched desire.
They spoke in whispers. When he was about to moan she covered his mouth. At the end, he would embrace her and fall asleep for a few minutes wishing he could stay. Satiated love is the only sleeping pill that works, it is the only thing stronger than guilt, the irrefutable evidence of sin. For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. A few minutes of rest and the weight of the world came back, the restless man who was always in a hurry, the one who had to look discreetly out the window before slipping out of her room and walking down to his.
Now, one or two minutes to six, on the balcony, he realized that he had dressed to look his best because she would be there and he would look in her intelligent and beaming eyes for approval. Georgia Davis, Georgia on my mind, he joked, whispering into her ear. No one else knew that the tie he had chosen for the occasion was a gift from her. They would sit very far from each other at the dinner table and try not to look at each other too much, but that would make the few glances they exchanged all the more exciting. He liked a line from a poem by T. S. Eliot: With private words I address you in public.
He would let her know that tonight, when they were back at the hotel, after the dinner and the assembly and the concert to honor the strikers, he would come down to her room as he had the night before. He wouldn’t even have to knock on the door because she would leave it unlocked. It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, says the Song of Solomon. Lines that belonged not in sermons but in a whisper in the dark. Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
The curtains would be drawn, the lights turned off, but his silhouette would be visible against the lights of the parking lot, tinged with the red, yellow, and blue of the hotel sign. He was the man whose true self almost nobody, or nobody but her, could see. Undressing silently in the room, staring at each other, her body even more tempting because it was no longer young, flattered by the strength of male desire, a real man and not a photograph or a symbol or one of those images of a saint. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
* * *
He had been so tired, yesterday evening, after an early morning and the flight from Atlanta and the lost hour at the airport due to a bomb threat, another one, and the arrival in Memphis, just a week after the previous trip, and the press conference, the malicious questions, the faces that had to be studied one by one in search of a look or expression that signaled immediate danger, the endless meetings, the rivers of unnecessary and worn-out words. Tired and depressed, exhausted to the bone, with no strength or desire for anything that wasn’t his bed, listening to the wind howl against the window and then the downpour of rain or hail.
He had fainted the Sunday before as he was getting ready to deliver a sermon and then suddenly found himself making a public confession. In the motel in Memphis the Holy Spirit seemed to have abandoned him. He had a fever, or at least he touched his forehead and wanted to feel a fever so he would have an excuse. He often dreamed that he was at the pulpit about to deliver a sermon and had not prepared anything. He dreamed that he kept getting lost in stairways and corridors on his way to an auditorium or church where people were waiting for him. He told Abernathy, not without remorse, that he was not well, that he didn’t even have the energy to get out of bed or light a cigarette. And his friend, who knew him so well, and was probably just as tired, told him not to worry, that he would speak on his behalf and apologize for his absence. And besides, who would even go out that night, with the storm that was already brewing, the repeated alerts on the radio and television about hurricane-like winds, torrential rains, and floods.
* * *
Not having to go anywhere that night had been an unspeakable blessing. Staying in bed while the storm raged outside, not having to see anyone for hours, doing nothing, perhaps watching a movie on TV for once; or just falling asleep, thinking about the woman who would be here in a few hours, all the way from Florida, because he had called her and said, almost in a whisper, breathing close to the receiver, that he had to see her, those were his words, I need you next to me.
It was a request for help that contained no promises. Neither was asking the future for anything more than what they already had. Secrecy, the brevity of each encounter, shaped the only world where they could or desired to be together. Every meeting was a mutual gift, but there was no heartbreak at the moment of saying goodbye. Her intelligence and sense of humor allowed her to see in him what few others could: a man, not the symbol, not the probable martyr, not the prophet.
The phone rang but he had fallen asleep so soundly that the rings repeated several times inside his dream before he woke up and reached for the bedside table. Perhaps it was her. Perhaps she was calling from the pay phone in a gas station to tell him the car had broken down and she would not be able to make it that night, or that she had changed her mind and had decided to stay with her husband.
But it was Abernathy. He could hear the storm in the phone, accompanied by a clamor that sounded like rain but was the crowd. They clapped and sang hymns and slogans. They repeated a name that was his. Abernathy stopped talking and raised the receiver so he could hear what was happening, all the people who had gathered despite the storm, wanting to hear him. How could he let them down. How could he stay in this room while their chants filled up the temple, thousands of men and women with their heads low, dressed in their Sunday best, black sanitation workers who did not even get gloves to do their jobs, much less health insurance or a day of rest; who lost days of wages if they got sick or if bad weather prevented the garbage trucks from going out; no pension, no workers’ compensation, nothing for their wives and children should anything happen to them, like the two men who had been crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of a truck was accidentally triggered during a heavy rainstorm.
* * *
There was no limit to the horror and injustice. The cry of suffering never ceased. There could be no rest, no pause. So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. He hung up the phone and remained sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, the loose tie hanging from his neck. Exhaustion was a stack of lead on his shoulders and a muddy swamp where every step sank and he no longer had the strength to keep moving.
As Job said, I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. But what could he give these people who had come out on a night like this to hear him, to see him from afar, to get close to him and touch him, to hope for some kind of revelation or miracle, something that no one could define, much less him, something that perhaps did not even exist.
They watched him with pleading eyes and he didn’t know what they were seeing. Seeing the way they welcomed him into their homes without running water or electricity, he felt ashamed in his suit and polished shoes. They asked him to autograph books and photographs, magazines with his face on the cover, loose pieces of paper, printed prayers, drawings where sometimes he even had a halo around his head. They squeezed his hands and hugged him, and took photos as if trying to confirm that he was really there; they asked him to hold their babies, some asked for money, showed him medical bills, eviction letters, exorbitant rent and electricity bills.
At any moment, from any direction, close or far, a gunshot could end it all in a tenth of a second, in the flash of a camera, and the darkness that followed would be a relief. No warning, no time to be afraid: like the time Medgar Evers, a friend from many years in the struggle, was walking home at night and a bullet slammed him against his own door with keys in hand; or that time in Harlem, when he was signing books and a thin woman with glasses made her way through the crowd toward him. She had a drawn face and that expression of fearful shyness that was common on some of the people who were about to meet him for the first time and could not look him in the eyes. Her coat was buttoned all the way up, her purse held tightly against her chest. She seemed to be holding a pen. But that wasn’t it. There was a glint and a sharp point.
The small hand suddenly tightened around the object and the pen became a knife. Now she was within arm’s reach and the eyes behind her glasses were not shy but bloodshot, dilated, full of rage. No one but him seemed to notice her. It was as if the weapon were their mutual secret. The blade went into his chest and turned like a screwdriver. It penetrated so close to the aorta that had he taken a deep breath or sneezed in the hours that followed, the tip of the letter opener would have pierced right through the artery and he would have drowned in his own blood.
He stayed with the blade sunk in his chest, in shock, unable to move, a paused tape, as the ambulance sped through the streets of Harlem en route to the hospital. The blade had been so close to the aorta his whole chest had to be opened to remove it. After five hours, they succeeded. At first, upon waking in the hospital bed under the effects of the anesthesia, he could not remember anything, except the sweet pleasure of deep sleep.
* * *
He looked at the faces from the lectern where the Bible lay opened before him. He looked at the microphone and felt the heat of the spotlights. The concave depth of the auditorium in the Masonic Temple was so great that even with two or three thousand people in the stands, the place seemed almost empty. The vast space magnified the echoes of the crowd and the sound of thunder and rain pounding against the high windows.
It felt like a storm at the end of the world, the beginning of the Flood. As the applause and the screams began to wind down, he leaned in and grasped the sides of the lectern, an instinctive gesture that even he found theatrical, just another piece of the act. But that night he was holding on in order not to collapse, not from exhaustion, but from the monotony and lack of self-respect, which he saw reflected in the faces of his friends, the believers, the ones who were always there, Abernathy and the others, Andrew Young, Kyles, determined and capable but also tired, worn out by the fight that never seemed to end or accomplish an indisputable result, sometimes turned against one another by trivial administrations or pride.
If it were just a matter of marching with composure and courage through the rows of police officers and angry white people, or even going to jail, or delivering sermons and hearing the roaring approval of the crowd at the end of every sentence, then it would be bearable. But there was the organizing, the fund-raising, the schmoozing.
They were all, and he knew this well about himself, made of fragile materials, mud and dust from the earth, a mixture of gold and clay; noble and corruptible at the same time; heroes one moment and cowards the next; secret disbelievers, not for lack of faith but for the endless repetition of the same words, no matter how true or necessary they were, the whole routine that those closest to him could anticipate play by play, with resignation, cynicism, word for word, night after night, sometimes even several times the same day, like the assistants and technicians who follow a politician on the electoral trail.
* * *
But the cause of justice and equality had to remain sacred, the stubborn vindication of nonviolence, now that the ghettos in the cities were igniting with fury and the chemical fire of napalm was raining in Vietnam while people ran terrified and their homes, their crops, their jungles burned. How can anyone not decry the war in Vietnam while condemning segregation and exploitation in America? Three hundred thousand dollars to kill each alleged Vietnamese enemy; but not even fifty dollars a year invested in the life of a poor person in America.
He repeated these figures in his speeches and anticipated the reaction of the crowd. With his voice hoarse from fatigue, he announced, almost like a vision, the great march of biblical proportions that would descend on Washington before the summer; even more people than in 1963, with more immediate and unequivocal demands: work, livelihood, and dignity for all.
They would come by the thousands from all across the country. They would come by train and in caravans of buses, carrying backpacks and tents, ready to occupy the great lawns of Washington. There would be trucks filled with farmworkers, and even mule carts from the poorest cotton fields of the South.
They would come marching in compact columns and singing hymns, just as they had walked through the streets of Montgomery and on the road from Selma, a multitude that just kept on growing and multiplying beyond their wildest predictions, black and white marching together, rabbis, Catholic priests, nuns, university professors from the North, even stiff Episcopalian bishops, the sound of millions of steps in unison. The more his strength gave out, the more he lost confidence, the more urgent it was to keep getting up, with or without hope, with the help of the Holy Spirit or with a hunger of the soul that perhaps had no cure.
* * *
The prophets had been vulnerable to disillusion, but not to vanity or ambition. They had been called and they had obeyed, knowing that life would have been easier if somebody else had been tapped to lend their voice to those words.
Jehovah called on Jeremiah to preach next to the gate in Jerusalem where the king went in and out, and he was whipped and locked in a cell with his hands and feet and neck fastened in stocks. When God chose an envoy it was beyond appeal. The selection was terrifyingly arbitrary; there appeared to be no motive or any particular feature or capacity in the chosen one.
The simplicity of the call was frightening. God said the name of the chosen one two times. Abraham, Abraham, he said, and Abraham answered, Here I am. And God was calling on him to behead his son Isaac. God imposed and demanded human sacrifices without explanation. He himself recognized that Job’s torment was for no reason. He welcomed Abel’s offerings and disdained those of his brother Cain. He called Moses’s name twice and ordered him to go before the pharaoh and demand the freedom of his people; but it was also He who hardened the heart of the pharaoh and thus brought upon the land of Egypt the plagues that He sent.
God broke the jaws of David’s enemies and crushed their teeth. God celebrated as the Babylonians sacrificed their children. God separated the waters of the Red Sea so his people could cross and then condemned them, as punishment for their ingratitude, to walk the desert for forty years before arriving at the Promised Land.
God allowed Moses to discern the Land of Canaan from the top of Mount Horeb, but He would have the prophet die before entering it. At the Garden of Gethsemane, in a night of terror and anticipation before the impending captivity, torture, and slow execution, Christ asked God if he could be spared his fate. But God remained silent, and a few moments before dying on the cross, Christ could not help but voice his doubt. Even the other two men who were being crucified insulted him. God was so often darkness and terror. In the place where Jacob wrestled an angel or a man till daybreak, the presence of God remained and it was a dreadful place.
* * *
And right now the wrath of God was descending over Memphis in all its terrifying magnificence. Lightning strikes the trees. The forests catch on fire. The wind tears the roofs of the poor, and rain floods the homes and roads around the delta. She would be driving on one of those roads at that very second, the windshield pounded by gusts of wind and rain, the woman he had begged to come be with him, to endure a long journey for a short and secret encounter, at most two hours. At first Job is caught between Satan’s malevolence and God’s whim, but then he is punished for the intellectual arrogance of demanding an explanation. Jonah wanted to escape the terrible fate of prophecy, so God led him to the sailors who would throw him overboard during a storm and then sent a whale to swallow him.
Deep in his heart, he had resisted going back to Memphis just as Jonah had resisted the divine order to preach at Nineveh. Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. How many times he had wished to run away, like Jonah, to disappear overnight and abandon the exhausting and tyrannical mission that had fallen on his shoulders.
* * *
It had not been a call. The voice of God did not wake him in the middle of the night saying his name two times. He had not responded: Here I am. The patriarchs and the prophets heard voices, clear and unappealable orders. When he was blinded by the presence of Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul heard his voice. Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
But schizophrenics also hear voices. And there was something very dangerous, very presumptuous, in considering yourself the recipient of a divine command. In his case, it could have been just a matter of chance, a series of misunderstandings. At the beginning, in Montgomery in ’55, there was no voice from God at the top of a mountain or in a desert. It was an assembly in the early days of the boycott, tempestuous and disorderly, a vote to elect a provisional spokesperson for the nascent movement. He did not even volunteer as a candidate. He was younger and less experienced than most of the people there, a newcomer to the city, and was just getting used to being the pastor of a church. Someone nominated him and he was voted in. It could have been somebody else. He hadn’t even met Mrs. Parks before she refused to give up her seat on the bus. He had never taken a bus in Montgomery, or Boston in any of the years during his doctorate in that unimaginable world of New England, where you quickly got used to using the same doors, the same park benches, the same classrooms, the same libraries. In Montgomery, as in Boston, he did not take the bus because he had his own car, a present from his father when he left for the doctorate.
How could his fate be determined when everything depended on so many coincidences, decisions taken at the last minute without much conviction. He had returned south so reluctantly, against his wife’s preference and his own wishes, though he would not acknowledge this to her or even himself. The truth is that he came back because he did not want to go against his father’s wishes again. The fact that he had decided to pursue the doctorate away from home after graduation, instead of staying with the congregation in Atlanta, had already been a source of tension. Why do you need to study theology and philosophy to be a Baptist pastor? his father had asked.
It had been difficult to stand by his decision, but not as much as he had anticipated. Eventually, his father agreed to it. It was this capitulation, and that of his mother, who was devastated that he was going so far, that made him doubt his purpose. He had always wanted to be a good son. Leaving them was much harder than he was willing to admit. How could a divine mandate to lead the poor and the persecuted fall on someone so privileged, someone raised in a loving family, a comfortable home, always protected by his parents and his older sister.
The church was an extension of the house. From the games with his siblings and their shared boredom during Sunday school, he had moved on to helping his father with the church. God was an invisible member of their house. He imagined God, who was both irascible and benevolent in the Bible, with the imposing presence and the deep voice of his father. What talent for resistance could someone who has been trained to revere his elders, and who is used to a comfortable life, possibly have? Tied to a fate he could no longer escape, even if he lived to be quite old, he imagined other possible futures and past decisions that could have taken him elsewhere.
He thought, most of all, of his time in Boston. He remembered the winter light that flooded the classrooms, the meditative hours in the library, the long halls with books and desks and small lamps, the drawers with blank paper and pencils, the white snow gently falling outside the window. Religion was not a sum of miraculous fantasies and terrible prejudices, it was a vast field of study ennobled by the intellectual rigor of philosophy and a wealth of historical scholarship, philology, archeology.
To make his parents happy, he wrote letters suggesting a longing for home he no longer felt. He enjoyed everything with spontaneity. He went to every seminar and spent Sunday evenings, and often entire nights, in the silence of the library.
The students attended class dressed as formally as the professors. For a time he took to smoking a pipe just like the others, and he also learned to conceal his southern accent and sound just like them. In their company, sometimes he forgot he was black.
In the chapel, during the Sunday morning service, the pastors delivered their sermons and read biblical passages with a distinguished accent and a sober intonation, as if they were reciting Emerson or Milton. No shouting, no arms waving, no eyes closed in ecstasy, no clapping, no stomping on the wooden floors until the whole place was shaking, no trance, no hysteria, no screaming, no spit flying over the audience.
He had come to feel secretly ashamed of his origins. In Boston, he came to prefer the Lutheran hymns, the choirs of men and women dressed in black robes, singing Bach cantatas. When they started dating, Coretta took him to see chamber music and piano recitals. She had straight hair and light skin. In church, she sang the soprano arias in the St. Matthew Passion. Dressed as if they were attending a religious service, they went to the opera to hear Donizetti, the sacred oratorios by Handel and Mendelssohn, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the Mass in B Minor by Bach.
* * *
They could have lived like that in New England. Coretta would have had the singing career she wanted, though he would have preferred that she put it to the side when the time came to raise a family. He could have accepted one of the job offers he started getting as soon as he finished the doctorate, as soon as he saw, for the first time, full of pride, his new full name, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the distinction of the initials and abbreviations, “Ph.D.” A professor of theology or philosophy, with a wool suit and leather elbow patches, white shirt, bow tie, pipe, a medieval dark gown and tam for official ceremonies, an office filled with books, academic journals, student papers, a window facing a lawn on campus, a house in a tree-lined suburb, not too far from the church that he would attend with his family on Sunday, and where he would preach every now and then as guest pastor.
Beneath the substrate of pure conviction was always the murmur of doubt, skepticism, remorse. The price of conformity was very high, but so was the price of rebellion, and the consequences of his action would affect others as well. Others would have raised their voices even if he did not. With more anger, more courage, more direct experience of the hardships he had not known. Others had risen in even darker times, and had paid the ultimate price without recognition or consequence for their executioners, while he got to study at a university in Boston and drive his own car to pick up his girlfriend and go to the classical music concerts and the student dances; while he had the luxury of traveling to Atlanta by plane during vacation and ordering his suits made to measure.
* * *
Moses could have had a splendid life as an Egyptian prince. He indulged in these wonderings and then felt ashamed of them. Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. How arrogant to compare oneself to a patriarch from the Old Testament; how insidious the suspicion that all was in vain. Instead of progress the years seemed to bring new possibilities for failure, new forms of bitterness. After every victory that seemed certain and luminous, there had been rage and new cruelty. Two weeks after the march in Washington, a bomb killed four little girls in a church in Birmingham on a clear Sunday morning in September. The tired crowd from the great march from Selma had yet to disperse when that gang of murderers who never was punished shot to death Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a blond woman, a mother of five, who had driven all the way from Detroit by herself to help the organizers. And after she was killed, the FBI lost no time spreading rumors about her, saying that she was a bad mother, a bad wife, a promiscuous woman who liked to sleep with black men.
Violence fueled more violence, and nonviolence. The righteous were humiliated and the killers went unpunished. The clear sense of victory, the intoxication of the struggle, the irrefutable virtue of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, had abandoned him in the last few years. In the early days of the movement, in Montgomery, in the incredulous joy of having resisted and prevailed in the boycott, he had believed that victories were not only possible but also irreversible. Three hundred and eighty-one days resisting, one after the other, walking on the sidewalks while the empty buses drove by, giving one another rides, enduring with dignity all the harassment by police.
Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. Black people in Montgomery had risen up, as miraculously as the crippled man in the Gospel, after more than three centuries of immobility and subjugation, and they had started marching.
Confident steps heading in one direction; not dreams of paradise, but concrete achievements. The right to sit in a bus or go to school, the wonder of common things, ordering a sandwich and a soda in a cafeteria, drinking from a public fountain, taking a stroll in a park, registering to vote without fear of being harassed, beaten, or even killed. But a little time went by and what they had conquered was lost, or someone found a loophole in a law to frustrate or delay the reforms.
School integration was decreed and the governors from the southern states simply closed the schools, preferring no education to classes with black people. And what good was it to be able to sit in the same cafeteria with white people if you had no money to buy a sandwich and a coffee? You could send your children to the same public schools now, but white people had already taken their kids elsewhere and now the classrooms were as run-down as the old schools that had once been reserved for your people.
The segregation that was no longer allowed under the law was now more effectively enforced with money. They spent millions of dollars sending rockets to the moon but fought over cents for public schools and hospitals and soup kitchens. Gutted neighborhoods, ravaged by crime, by the simultaneous brutality of police and gangs, by misery and ignorance; neighborhoods torched by the self-destructive anger of the very same people who had no means of getting away.
And the young people were angry, drunk on violence, behaving like gangsters, filled with the same hate that white people had toward them, mocking him and those who were like him, hurling insults like any old white racist, Martin Lucifer King, Martin Loser King.
He had seen them just a few days before, right there in Memphis, and before they even started yelling and breaking streetlamps and windows, he had known what was coming, he had felt the swell of the terrified crowd pushing forward, the primitive fear of being knocked down and crushed. He saw the frightened faces of his friends, and the striking workers with their identical banners, vowels and simple consonants, like the sounds of a prayer or a work song, I AM A MAN I AM A MAN I AM A MAN. The workers with their sun-damaged faces, their rough hands, their Sunday clothes, surrounded him to protect him, while the commotion grew in the tail of the march, on the slope down Beale Street, the display windows exploding like hailstorms, and the police officers preparing their shields and batons and sounding their sirens, grinning widely under the visors of their helmets, waiting for the perfect moment to launch their attack and plant the seed of terror in the rest of the crowd.
And while the young, in perfect formation, tore the banners to use the masts as weapons and began to throw rocks, breaking streetlights and windows, the shards of glass fell on the faces of terrorized people, screaming in panic, bleeding, fainting, overtaken by a flood that dragged everything in its path, the blindness of someone who is drowning and can’t get their head above water.
Later he saw his own face on the front page of the newspaper and felt ashamed by the public evidence of the fear he had felt: his body held by others, as if about to drown and not even trying to continue swimming, with his eyes wide open, a sheep or cow who has seen the glint of the blade that is coming for them.
* * *
He had never wished death more intensely than in those last few days, death because he knew he was too caught up in that world where there was no longer any other possible life for him. Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? To close one’s eyes and never have to open them again. To come home at night, very late, exhausted, after a long trip or an entire day of meetings; to get out of the car and look for the house keys under the dim streetlights, in the silence of a late hour; to have no time to even feel the impact, the bullet fired at close range from behind the honeysuckle tree; to die quickly and never know anything else. For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.
To close one’s eyes and be lost in sleep; to not wake up in anguish before the night is even over. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. To die so you don’t have to keep looking at the newspaper or at the television in anticipation of what they would be saying about you now.
The apostle of nonviolence was at the center of a riot caused by followers he could no longer control; he had left the scene cowardly, in a limousine that took him to the most luxurious hotel in Memphis, while his people burned the whole place down.
There was nothing they would not accuse him of. He was a communist and a traitor, a social climber who accepts money from white people. While he was safe at his luxury hotel, a cop was firing at a black boy at close range and then finishing him off on the ground with a bullet to the head. He preached evangelical poverty but had no trouble accepting gifts and treats from the millionaires of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, the docile black man who assured them there would be no revolution, the one who flew as a guest of honor in Nelson Rockefeller’s private jet. While American soldiers were dying heroically in Vietnam, he was taking the side of the communists, the enemies.
* * *
He had wished to simply die. He had longed for that moment in Harlem when the letter opener sank into his chest and his white shirt was quickly soaked in blood, the sweet instant when he lost consciousness. For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest. He had secretly wished, with obsessive impatience, with a morbid desire for sacrifice and martyrdom, that one of the death threats finally came true, one of those anonymous letters or calls in the middle of the night.
One shot and everything would end. One shot and perhaps he would even be lucky enough to not hear or feel anything. No one knew that he wasn’t brave: death was the only thing that no longer scared him. Much worse than dying is to never rest, always running late, always with the knowledge that somewhere else there’s a crowd waiting for you, that you will have to get on a stage again, face the blinding lights, and gather all your strength to repeat words that remain true and just, but that you simply can’t bear to hear yourself say again.
* * *
But this night, at the temple, after a few minutes of struggling to find his rhythm, the words began to flow on their own with a power that he had not anticipated or even thought he possessed anymore. They did not feel like his words. They did not flow from his tired repertoire. Their metallic echo filled and shook the room like the thunder outside. He felt overwhelmed by the words and hypnotized by the metal and cadence of his own voice, no longer governed by reason or will, and much less by the rhetorical devices of a preacher. Something similar had happened in those days of fear and solitude at the prison in Birmingham, the solitary confinement cell in a basement where only the sounds of boots, metal, and rats could be heard. A trance. Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison: and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.
Someone had left a newspaper in the cell. In the fold of a pocket, he found a pencil they missed during the pat-down. He began to write with the light that filtered through the bars, using the margins of the newspaper. There was barely any light and his eyes hurt from trying to focus on the small handwriting. He had to take advantage of every blank space. When steps approached, he hid the pencil and sat on the newspaper. At some point, he began to write so fast, the writing was running ahead of his thinking. The ecclesiastical formalities had given way to vindicated and outraged vehemence.
He would sharpen the pencil against the wall and continue filling margin after margin. When he ran out of space, a black prisoner who distributed food gave him some scraps of paper. It was so hot inside the cell, he had to keep wiping the sweat from his hands and forehead to protect the paper. He wrote without uncertainty, without turning back, with absolute conviction that he was right, that this was the truth and it was being dictated to him.
* * *
It was like that now, at the temple. He was speaking instead of writing, but the words flowed with the same urgency. He was at a pulpit in front of two thousand people instead of in a cell, but the fever was identical, the inner flood, the trance. The words swelled up as powerfully as the air that filled his lungs at every breath. He felt the blood rush through his body, his hands clutching the edges of the lectern as he leaned in.
He held up the Bible and there was no need to open it because he knew its every word, and the right passages came to his lips as he needed them. He held the book like a tool, a percussion instrument to strike against his palm, a hammer that sounded like thunder.
He no longer thought about the proximity of his friends or tried to see beyond the blinding lights and the TV cameras. He spoke into a darkness or an abyss of silence populated by a few voices. He challenged them and said things he had never said aloud before, only acknowledged to himself. He was alone at the top of the stage and far from the stands of the huge auditorium but he still perceived the unanimous response of the crowd as if he were singing the call of a work song. At thirty-nine years he felt as old as Moses and saw everything before him with a strange clarity that must only come after death.
There was angst pressing out against his chest, the sadness of a farewell but also a unique joy. The fever that unleashed his words was its own fuel and intensified.
Like a musician in a state of trance, he kept going deeper inside himself, while commanding with even greater control the attention and fervor of the crowd. All the darkness that had been germinating within him was suddenly bursting from his chest in a torrent of words. Fear became courage, despair became defiance, frustration became serenity. He defied whoever wanted to kill him or slander him. No man scared him; no lie, no humiliation, no extortion. He opened his eyes wide as if he were seeing events that did not yet exist, things that would only happen after he died.
He finished abruptly and could only stand with his hands clutching the lectern. Abernathy hugged him and led him to a chair. He was drenched in sweat as if they had just pulled him half-conscious from a river.
* * *
How strange that a night and almost a full day later, that lightness of being, that calm without guilt, was still with him. It remained like the warmth of the afternoon in Memphis, that suspended moment when the sky is an ember of light before dusk. The wind was picking up. Perhaps it was better to go back and get a coat.
Abernathy was still in the bathroom, although he had promised not to take long, just a moment to put on a bit of cologne. The driver of the Cadillac had turned on the engine. She would be in her room, downstairs, with the door half-open, attentive to the sounds outside, perhaps applying lipstick in the mirror, waiting to distinguish his voice among the many, so she could leave right at that moment and get in the other car. It was now too late to smoke that cigarette after all.
Next to the Cadillac he recognized one of the musicians who would play that night, the trumpeter. He had made him promise to play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” God can take it all or give it all, more than you can dare ask, more than the poor imagination can desire. Leaning on the balcony, he counted all the gifts he had received on that trip, in just a few hours, the trip to Memphis that he had undertaken with such reluctance, with a taste of ashes in his mouth, so deep into that darkness of the soul that he never thought he would come out.
It was not that he had regained hope, but rather, he did not need to feel it, just as at this moment he did not feel fear, physical exhaustion, or even the passage of time. At dawn, in her room, as he was saying goodbye, he had said: “What little time we have.” But he had said it without complaint, with gratitude that such little time could encompass so many gifts, secret lights in other people’s rooms and in motels, minutes that were rescued from the whirlwind of obligations, the mandatory fate that he no longer saw any point in resisting, just as you can’t rebel against chance, or the times you had to live, or the color of your skin.
* * *
But it was time to go. The more precious the time, the faster it runs. Below, his friends were getting in the cars and asking him to hurry. He caught a whiff of Abernathy’s cologne and as his hands left the railing a shot he would not hear pierced through his jaw and his neck and his spine and lifted him up and threw him against the door of room 306 and then onto the concrete floor, where he remained with his eyes wide open and an expression of awe and wonder, a knee bent and a foot with a black shoe and a black sock sticking through the bars of the balcony, shaking.