“WHY DON’T THEY COME TO VISIT ME, HERE IN THE HOSPITAL?” Reverend Shuttlesworth asked the boy. “You come.”
Nobody could smile like Edmund’s minister—all teeth, all sunshine. Smiling now, smiling up from his hospital bed. Same as the pulpit smile, but Reverend Shuttlesworth was lying in white sheets, not standing, not weaving left and right before his people, his narrow tie leaping like a dancing snake.
“Who?” the boy asked.
“King,” his minister answered. “King and Abernathy. You here. Where they?”
The boy shrugged. He retreated back into the ignorance of youth; he was little, he could shrug and say “I don’t know,” but he smiled when he said it, like sunshine, he hoped. (He knew nobody was admitted here to the bedside of Reverend Shuttlesworth—doctor and wife orders—but he had slipped in. So if he slipped in, why couldn’t the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.?)
“I just got to come see you ’cause you my hero,” Edmund soothed.
“I thought Lone Ranger was your hero?” Minister was pleased, teasing him.
“Not anymore. I gonna be you.”
“Martin Luther King Jr. is a man of God, and I love him. But we ain’t the same. We ain’t no identical twins.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pray with me!” He reached out his hand from under the white sheet to Edmund, and then Reverend Shuttlesworth closed his eyes. “Jesus, take this youngun. Be at Edmund’s side as you ever have by mine. When the house fall, lead him out. When the bomb burst, be his shield; put a helmet on his head and be his protection. Put love in his heart. Teach him. ‘Love your enemies; bless them that persecutes you.’ In the jail cell, tell Edmund—you with him, you with him even to the end of the world. In Christ’s holy name, Amen.”
They opened their eyes, and Edmund said, “I didn’t let them put me in jail. I just ran off.”
“Did you?” Minister wrinkled his forehead. He stared hard but loving. “Then I got to tell you. Don’t be afraid of the jail. They can’t jail a soul. Your spirit—it remain free, body behind bars.”
“Yessir.”
“Next time, you go on to jail like a good boy.”