Everyone in Atlanta expected the son of the city’s most influential pastor would be eager to join the church. The truth was that when he was seven, doing so was the farthest thing from his mind. But during Ebenezer’s annual two-week revival in May of 1936, his sister boldly stepped forward for baptism, and this stung him sorely, the thought that Christine might get a leg up on him in anything. Halfheartedly he submitted to the ritual. But even then some critical, questioning part of him stood back, skeptical, watching himself from a distance, and mocking him a little because not only had the “crisis moment” associated with conversion eluded him but he could not square the over-the-top emotionalism of the fundamentalist Baptist church — talking in tongues and flailing on the floor when “getting happy”—with his preference for coolly and deliberately thinking things through.
Sometimes he felt at odds with others at Ebenezer. His Sunday-school teachers had little education to speak of. Nevertheless, they believed. Although none had heard of biblical hermeneutics, each old deacon and assistant pastor had been saved in that revered and awful (to him) moment of epilepsy and seizure so many said lay in wait one day for him. He told no one how that prediction cut him off at the knees after he saw a light-skinned girl from Booker T. Washington High School, one he’d been attracted to, struck down by the spirit in his father’s church. Lightning seemed to single her out from the other parishioners fanning themselves and singing one of his favorite hymns, “Honor, Honor”—she was adance in the seat beside her startled mother, then it lifted her like a broken doll and flung her helplessly to the hard wooden floor. Her eyes turned up in her head. Veins in her throat stood out. There was the possibility she might swallow her tongue, and that frightened him all the more and made his heart leap in his chest. He watched her wide-eyed, squeezing his hands together, as she kicked the air and tore loose her clothing, as unconscious of her nakedness as someone in one of the ancient, pre-Christian mystery cults. For months she’d ignored him. She’d been haughty, distant, in control. Now she writhed on the floor like a worm. Water ran down her legs. Her light cotton dress rose above her brown thighs, giving him an eyeful of what he’d fantasized about all summer long before the girl’s mother shoved her garments down. His own mother spun him back around in his seat. Watching the girl had aroused him. Biting down hard on his knuckles, he felt burning shame shot through with the wound of desire. Spiritual hunger and sexual longing simultaneously. He closed his eyes, praying that his voyeurism, like that of Ham, had not offended the god thunderously unleashed inside the girl, yet if this violent seizure was what it meant to be saved, he hoped it would never happen to him.
He wondered if his faith was weak, if perhaps he was the worst of sinners and hypocrites. Others, he felt, suspected this too when at thirteen he shocked his teacher and classmates by rejecting the idea of Christ’s bodily resurrection from the sepulcher. He questioned, he doubted the Bible’s literal interpretation all through his teens, and wondered if the Negro church would ever be more Apollonian, as intellectually respectable as it was Dionysian and emotionally intense. The conflict between the intellect and emotional fervor, between the head (gnosis) and the heart (pistis), only deepened as he grew older. It held him back from following in his father’s footsteps. Medicine or law, he thought, might suit him better than churches that often seemed so otherworldly they were no earthly good at all. Preparing men for heaven was all well and good. But, he wondered, what of their conditions in the here and now? Then at Morehouse his liberal professors George D. Kelsey and Benjamin Mays gave him scholarly models for the kind of minister he one day hoped to be, filling his head with literature and philosophy, but even a jackleg preacher incapable of writing his own name had direct knowledge of the peace that passeth understanding he had only experienced in books.
During the Montgomery campaign, that ended. Threats on his life and those of Coretta and Yolanda, whom he saw too seldom at the height of the bus boycott, were nothing new. But one call shook him. It caught him, this newly minted Ph.D. whose future seemed so bright before the boycott’s leadership was thrust upon him, one weary night when he came home feeling euchred and afraid his family might be snatched away. His wife was waiting by the telephone. She handed it to him. “Listen, nigger,” the gin-soaked voice said, “we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery. If you aren’t out of this town in three days we’re gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
He knew he could not go on. The forces gathered against him were too many and great. Out there in the night someone was loading a 20-gauge pump-action shotgun to hunt him down; pouring gasoline into a glass jug to blow the limbs off his baby. They might be with the police. Or the military. Or Negroes displeased with all he’d stirred up. He could turn to no one for help. Not the Montgomery police, the politicians in Washington, or his parents. No one. Here, the roots of segregation ran deep, fueled by poverty. The seventy thousand whites on the average earned $1,730 yearly, the fifty thousand Negroes $970. Fewer than two thousand of the voting-age Negroes were registered, and humiliating obstacles were placed in their way. In Montgomery no Negroes held public office. The uneducated were apathetic, resigned to second-class status. The learned, especially if they belonged to any of the black civic groups, were factionalized and fought more often than they agreed.
For a long time that night he walked the floor, thinking of Revelations 22:15, his head tipped, both hands clenched into fists, his stomach turned to lead, searching for some way to escape his duties on the Montgomery Improvement Association without looking like a coward or a fool. Once his foot struck the leg of a table and brought a lamp and a photo of the baby bouncing onto the carpet. He swore under his breath and undid the mess he’d made. His directionless pacing brought him into the kitchen — he could do less damage there. In order to find something to do with his trembling hands, he put a fresh pot of coffee on the stove, silently watched it brew, then slumped down with his cup at the kitchen table. Coretta was rooms away, caring for the baby. He rubbed his face with both hands. He began to heave for breath, knowing if he failed in this fight against evil, surely the others who’d sacrificed so much would falter as well. His name would be struck from the Book of Life; the boycott would unravel and nothing would have been accomplished. They would be worse off than before. Demoralized, defeated. But in heaven’s name, what man could continue under this weight? He felt caged. Chained. In bondage and no longer belonging to himself. How had Boston University’s rising star come to this cul-de-sac? From childhood and the days his father talked politics at the dinner table, he’d dreamed of uplifting the Race, studied and prepared himself for this great task, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith only to discover, too late, that nobody — or so he feared — gave a goddamn about his bourgeois sacrifices. If Yolanda and Coretta were killed, who would care? If there was no God, as so many thinkers claimed, he was a fool for endangering his family. Love was the ontological foundation of values. God was love. It followed that without Him there could be no basis for all his appeals to justice from the pulpit. No reason for anyone to care about the poor. No argument, in the end, to counter slavery itself, for in a materialistic, mechanistic world, a neutral universe onto which man projected his delusions of freedom and inherent worth, no value claims could be made at all — the cosmos would be irrational, not benign, indifferent to order and measure, a nightmare in the mind of some devil who could not roll himself awake. Thus far Montgomery had shown him that if God was not dead, He must certainly be deaf to His people’s suffering.