Arlene placed our food on the counter, her lips compressed, as Smith came back from the bathroom, and rang up the bill. “That’s four dollars and fifty cents.”
I handed her a five-dollar bill. She placed it in the cash register, then scooped out my change. I thrust my palm toward her for the coins, and had perfect control of myself, the magnanimity and external calm my mother had insisted upon, and which the Movement’s leaders so nobly embodied, until she slapped the money on the counter, and something inside me (I don’t know what) snapped (I don’t know how), flooding me with a hatred so hot, like a drug, I was nearly blinded by it as I threw the food in her face, hurled from the counter sugar canisters and ketchup bottles smashing against the wall behind the grill, screaming so loud and long my glasses steamed; then, as Arlene fled toward the rear of the diner, I stormed outside to the car, Smith right at my heels.
He was grinning. “Very nice. You were vicious, Bishop. I think your best line was calling her an insignificant, execrable bitch mired in the booboisie — that’s from Mencken, right?”
“I said that?”
“Oh, yeah,” he cackled. “And more. You left her toasted, roasted, and with an apple in her mouth. It was choice. You sounded like William F. Buckley on bad acid. I always knew it’d be sweet to see a black intellectual go ballistic.”
I was shaking too badly to drive. And I felt ashamed, as if I’d failed the minister, my mother, myself. I gave Smith my keys — his smile mashed his cheeks up in parallel moons — and within a few minutes we were back on the highway, heading farther south. For the longest time I sat with my hands squeezed between my knees, my fists clenched, afraid that at any moment I’d see in the rearview mirror a highway patrol car pulling up behind us, yet I felt exhilarated by what I’d done.
Smith kept grinning at me, happily patting out rhythms on the steering wheel with his palms. “You all right.” He reached over and patted my shoulder. “With a li’l more work, you gonna love it where I live.”
4
There were many times when he wondered if he was wrong.
Sitting by the window in the second row of first-class seats, all the others empty at this hour, on the predawn flight that shuttled him back and forth between Chicago and Atlanta, where he was determined to earn his $6,000-a-year salary by delivering a sermon each Sunday, he thought back to the astonishing victories granted him by the Lord of Love, and forward to the November retreat planned for his staff at which time he felt he should remind them how he was still searching and did not have all the answers. Nonviolence, he felt, was an experiment with truth. It was a truth-seeking process. That was all in this world he could say with certainty …
It was four-thirty in the morning. The engines of the airplane roared around him as it tore down the runway, shaking loose poorly secured doors on the overhead compartments and, behind him, throwing dishes to the floor in the tiny cubicle that served as a galley. That so much metal could even leave the ground and stay airborne always startled and delighted him (and in single-engine planes, in which he refused to ride, terrified him). Airplanes piqued his anagogic and analogical side, the old student of Aquinas who enjoyed reasoning vertically from the natural world toward heaven, which these flying machines came close to bumping into. Unconsciously he pressed his feet forward under the seat in front of him to keep his small black suitcase from sliding into the aisle, though if it spilled open there would be little to retrieve because he felt best when he traveled light with as little baggage as possible, physical and metaphysical. Toward the front of the plane, beneath the red FASTEN SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING signs, the black stewardess who’d brought coffee and a pillow and fussed over him when he boarded was strapping herself into a bucket seat that folded out of the wall. She’d told him her name was Stephanie. An Alabaman raised to value the goodwill and hospitality that was so much a part of his own upbringing, she’d asked for his autograph and couldn’t do enough for him. Apparently, she’d seen his name on the passenger list, then rushed out and purchased forty copies of Stride Toward Freedom, inserting in each one the inscription she wanted him to write for her family and friends. “I hope you won’t mind,” she’d said. He saw the cardboard box of books at her feet, and sighed. All he wanted to do was work on his sermon and nap before they arrived in Atlanta. She couldn’t know how sensitive he was about people fawning over him, or how every worldly honor he received (he had more medals than a Russian general) threw him into the deepest reflection on whether he deserved these distinctions and if one day they’d prove to be more weight than they were worth. Glorifying any man was a sin. But he accepted the honors so as not to offend. People sent him photos of their newborns named after him, their wedding snapshots, and constantly wrote him requests for his autographed portrait. Always he or someone on his staff responded. After his trip to India he’d vowed to set aside one day a week for fasting and meditation, and to spend more time in study — he was certain he needed these things to be a better leader. Yet there never seemed to be enough time to keep those vows … Their eyes caught across the cabin. Stephanie was smiling at him again, then she winked and looked back at the clipboard on her lap.
Suddenly he felt warm. With two fingers he pulled loose the tight knot of his tie, undid the top button on his shirt, then pushed up the window’s stiff curtain at his right, peering down at blinking lights on the plane’s silvery deltoid wing, and beyond that to the waters of Lake Michigan. The sun, huge and liquid, hung over the horizon. From this height waves wimpling the blue surface looked frozen, as if someone had called time out on all motion in the world below, and the Wheel of Life stopped to give everyone time to catch his breath. And then he could see nothing as the plane began its steep ascent to thirty-five thousand feet — he only knew they were rising to that altitude because the pilot, a southerner by his accent, came on over the crackling loudspeaker to tell passengers his flight plan and the temperature in Atlanta and to report that their crew had a combined total of fifty thousand hours in the air. Somehow the pilot’s voice and experience put him at ease. Or maybe it was the vulnerability he felt whenever he flew, knowing that someone he couldn’t see or talk to had control over his destination and whether he lived or died, and most likely that person was trustworthy since his own life depended on doing his job well. It wasn’t easy to be an atheist on an airplane. No sooner had you strapped in than you had to believe in something beyond yourself. Perhaps there was a sermon here, an exemplum he might use on Sunday. But no, afterward someone would pick it apart, like the monk Gaunilo shredding Anselm’s proof for God’s existence. It was too whimsical. Yet in a small way it reminded him of that terrible night in Montgomery when his faith, lukewarm since childhood, became real.