His fingers tightened round his empty cup until it shattered, obliterating inside and out. He took a deep breath. In resistance to oppression, he realized, there was fear of reprisals, in acquiescence the annihilation of self-worth, in fame the fear of humiliation, in strength the fear of enemies, in social stature the fear of slander, in health the fear of illness, in beauty the fear of old age, in scholarship the fear of disputants, in living … the certainty of death. His thoughts churned on, complicated, exotic. He felt too tired to move, but his mind, from surface to seabed, kept whirring widdershins.
At last he began to pray. To whom — or what — he could not say. Not asking for anything then. Not fighting, only confessing, “Lord, I have nothing left …” His gaze drifted to the fragments of the cup that was no longer a cup. But where had the “cup” gone? His fist opened, disappearing into his hand. Where had his “fist” gone? Then it came quietly, unbidden. He was traveling light again, for the long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, the very belief in an “I” that suffered and strained to affect the world, dissolved, and for the first time he felt like a dreamer gently roused from sleep and forgetfulness. Awake, he saw he was not the doer. How could he have ever believed otherwise? That which he’d thought practiced virtue, surrendered to vice, held degrees, opinions and elaborated theories, and traveled toward a goal was spun from a spiderweb of words, no more real than the cantels of the erstwhile cup before him. Later, he would tell reporters and his congregation the room was rayed with shadowless light, and the Lord said unto him, Stand up for righteousness, stand up for the truth, and God will be at your side forever, but in fact the light came from him — not without — and the vox Dei he heard had been his own. Not I, he heard it whisper again in the suddenly transparent kitchen, but the Father within me doeth the works … I seek not my will but the will of the Father who sent me …
The stewardess’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “The captain has turned off the seat-belt sign. You are free to walk around the cabin if you wish.”
He struggled with the seat belt cutting into his belly and made a note to himself to push back a little earlier from banquet tables in the future. Finally the buckle sprang open, and he brought down the tray tucked into the seat in front of him. From his briefcase he removed the unfinished pages of his sermon and spread them before him, still thinking of his “Kitchen Conversion.” He’d not experienced anything quite like it thereafter. Now it was a faint memory, like first love, but he knew enough to trust the Lord to remove any obstacles — himself included — placed in the way of his ministry. Needless to say, that perplexed most of his aides, the purely political ones. Again and again they told him letting God handle little details was fine at Ebenezer but if he hoped to stay at the forefront of the Movement he damned well needed to organize his campaigns better Perhaps Chicago was proving them right. There were factors he had not foreseen. Down South the lives of whites and blacks were impeached to such a degree that bloodlines and surnames were shared. Like it or not, they were one people created in the cauldron of the Peculiar Institution. There was nothing uncommon about white babies nursing at the breasts of a black housekeeper. White politicians had a Negro (and most likely an Indian) hiding somewhere back in their family tree. If you went back to A.D. 700, everyone on earth had a common ancestor; no two persons, regardless of their race, could be less closely related than fiftieth cousins. Each man and woman on the planet today was a direct descendant of Jesus, Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, Tutankhamen, and Judas Iscariot. And, oh, interrelatedness went farther than even that. Each of the twenty thousand breaths we drew each day contained a quadrillion atoms breathed by the rest of humanity within the past week, and one’s next breath brimmed with more than a million atoms that once swirled within the chests of Anaximander, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Vivekananda, and the Aborigines of Australia. Given that ground of overlapping lives one could hope that once the artificial, legal barriers to integration were removed, the children of masters and slaves might recognize that Race was an illusion, all children were literally — genetically — their own, and embrace one another as members of a single tribe.
Yes, he knew the South. The North, of course, was another matter. Northern cities, he was ready to believe, were, as the Book of Genesis claimed, the products of Cain. Mercifully, they were behind him for another weekend.
And now the stewardess was moving his way, struggling with the editions it would take him over an hour to individually sign for her loved ones. Joints in his fingers would throb, he’d have to soak his hand later in a pan of hot water, as he often did after standing in receiving lines and pressing the flesh with thousands of admirers. And that was just all right. As Abu Sa‘id, an Islamic scholar he admired, might put it, there was nothing inside the blue coat and skirt Stephanie was wearing except Allah.
5
We stayed on State Route 51 south from Carbondale, following a map Amy scrawled on the back of SCLC stationery as Smith did impersonations of the waitress Arlene and the old man in the Pit Stop. He was a remarkably talented mimic, I realized during the rest of the ride, and so scathingly funny in his interpretations that even while Amy and I laughed until tears cascaded down our cheeks, which helped me forget for a while my shame at the damage I’d done to the diner (every police car we passed made me squirm down in my seat), I was afraid to think of Smith applying his imitative skills on me. The possibility of seeing things as he did, from the oblique angle of alienation, fascinated and frightened me at the same time; he was so antithetical to King, yet in some ways I saw in Smith the distillation of the minister’s message to a black student he met at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania, young man so consumed by anger and hatred and dualism that all King could say was, “Son, the best thing you can do is try to understand yourself.” Smith forced me to think on this, to turn it over and over, and inspect it from every side: My Self. Yet for all his similarities to King, his talk earlier about envy and divine rejection put me on edge — indeed, had briefly pushed me over it. My skinned knuckles were sore and I’d cut my left forearm when smashing bottles on the counter. In other words, I’d injured myself quite as much as I’d wasted the Pit Stop. And it was his — Chaym Smith’s — doing. But slowly, as I saw him slip effortlessly into Arlene’s physical eccentricities, I began to feel that, for all his exasperating qualities, perhaps he could stand in for King, and told him so.
“Sure, I can mark him,” he said. “That’s easy. Everybody’s playing a role anyway, trying to act like what they’re supposed to be, wearing at least one mask, probably more, and there’s nothing underneath, Bishop. Just emptiness …”
The Chevelle coasted down a dusty road trenched between enormous trees that domed overhead, breaking sunlight into flecks of leaf-filtered brilliance that flickered on a road that wound past a dilapidated Methodist church and ended in front of a rough farmhouse. It seemed to spring up suddenly out of kudzu vines and broomsedge, a one-story structure erected on rocks: it floated above these huge stones like a raft, shadowed by a double-trunked oak tree in the yard. Paint on the front porch was peeling away in large strips like sunburned skin. The yard, wild with windblown weeds, was as uncultivated as a backfield full of burdocks and snakes. I cannot say I was relieved to arrive at this remote, rural destination. The heat was withering. Out there more than two miles from the highway, and possibly three to the nearest store, there were none of the distractions to rescue a man at night from the feelings and thoughts he least wanted to confront.