“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t feel sorry. There’s no place anywhere for me. I seen that a long time ago. Wherever I go, I’m a nigger. Oh, and I been to mother Africa. Over there, where people looked like me, I didn’t fit either. I don’t belong to a tribe. To them I was an American, a black one, and that meant I didn’t belong anywhere.” He patted his pants and shirt, searching for his cigarettes. Having found the pack in his breast pocket, Smith lit one with a Zippo lighter, and blew a smoke ring my way. Then quietly he asked, “What about you? Do you feel at home—really at home — anywhere?”
“No.” I thought of my blundering pass earlier in the farmhouse. “I don’t. Ever …”
“Then you’re damned too,” Smith said. “You got the mark. That’s what I seen on you. Outcasts know each other. The blessed know us too, and keep their distance, and I can’t say I blame ’em. We scare ’em. We make ’em uncomfortable. We’re the unwanted, the ones always passed over. Until the day we die, we’re drifters. Won’t no place feel right for long. And that’s okay. I accept that. Hell, I embrace it. My spirit don’t ever have to be still. It don’t need to sleep. Fuck that. The only thing is, I don’t want to be forgotten. Not by the goddamn sheep. Or God. I want to do something to make Him remember this nigger—me—for eternity.
Then Smith was quiet for a while, staring past me toward the lights of the farmhouse, and something in me quieted as well. He was a man without a home. Without a race. I pitied him and myself, for what he’d said about knowing no place on earth where he could find peace and security was something I’d often felt and feared, and perhaps that was even why I wanted — or believed I wanted — Amy. Now I feared it less, and for the first time since Chaym Smith surfaced during the Chicago riots, I understood the labyrinthal depths of his (our) suffering. Or did I? Hadn’t he said all stories were lies? What, then, was I to make of the one he’d just told me? It had seduced me, but as always I didn’t exactly know where truth ended and make-believe began with him.
“What will you do?” I asked. “Doc told us to help you—”
“Help me, then.” He got to his feet, brushing grass off the seat of his britches. “Best thing you and the girl can do is teach me what I don’t know about Dr. King.” His smile gleamed in the moonlight, followed by that maddening, ticlike wink. “Do that, and I’ll take care of everything else.”
6
At the SCLC part of my job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity — particularly what took place in the interstices. Naturally, this is where the stories of all doubles occur. In a spiral notebook, one I kept from my college days, I made entries on Chaym Smith’s progress, having no idea at the time that just possibly I was composing a gospel. I — even I — was startled to discover how much he’d already absorbed about King since 1954, as a man might meticulously study his rival, or an object of love, or — in his case — someone he loved and envied simultaneously. He was determined to possess the mystery of the minister’s power and popularity, to make it his own. In the days following our arrival at the Nest, one flowing into the next in a round-the-clock ribbon of dress rehearsals for the role Smith was set on playing, we three were subtly transformed, Amy no less than I as we looked to impress the matrix of the minister Unto our charge.
Of course, he began with the Bible, rereading his heavily underlined New Testament in a marathon review that began Friday late and lasted well into the following Monday His capacity for sustained, one-pointed concentration was uncanny, a skill — that of dharana—he’d acquired during his year at the temple in Kyoto. He highlighted in red every statement by Jesus, who most certainly was known as “Joshua” in his own time and possibly was a member of the Essenes, a Jewish monastic order influenced by Hinduism. Around the farmhouse Smith had Amy pin photographs of everyone important in King’s life and sheets of paper containing the scriptural citations most often encountered in his sermons. These he committed to memory, sometimes through rote repetition, sometimes through mnemonic devices that allowed him to absorb whole speeches, provided he could call up the pictorial “pegs” on which key phrases and ideas had been placed. Soon enough it became clear that as Smith immersed himself in the first thirty-seven years of King’s journey, he was entering a portal that, far from stopping at the borders of the black world or the Baptist faith, exploded outward into what King himself once called, in a phrase far more revealing of himself than he knew, the “inescapable network of mutuality.”
He sent me to the state college over in Carbondale, where I photocopied the available sermons by preachers who’d influenced King’s oratorical style. This took a full day, and led to the startling (for me) and exhilarating (for Smith) discovery that many of the minister’s most famous speeches were tissues of pirated material from nearly three dozen theologians and popular (white) American preachers from the ’4os and ’5os, their ideas and idioms, voices and vocabularies, so blended with his own blistering denunciations of bigotry that, once I brought these documents back to the Nest, we found it impossible to demarcate where the minds (and the archaeology of that most ancient of objects, the self) of Harry Emerson Fosdick, C. L. Franklin, and Robert McCracken ended and King’s properly commenced. In his sermons he was, in essence, not one man but an integrated Crowd, containing here a smidgen of Walter Rauschenbusch, there a bit of Gerald Kennedy, and everywhere the imposing influence of his father. In effect, the minister riffed (not unlike Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington) on the entire, two-millennia-old history of Christendom, blending its best and making that his own in a stunningly Yankee amalgam.
Smith found this discovery of some of King’s sources, his borrowings, gratifying. Gleefully so. “You know, I always figured he couldn’t be as smart as he seems,” Smith said, yet I doubted he believed that. He was looking for faults, anything to reduce the minister’s stature and give himself room to breathe. But I wondered, as we examined King’s intellectual genesis and his Elizabethan borrowings, if the self we constructed was anything more than a fragile composite of other selves we’d encountered — a kind of epistemological salad — indebted to all spoken languages, all evolutionary forms, all lives that preceded our own, so that, when we spoke, it could be said, in the final analysis, subjectivity vanished and the world sang in every sentence we uttered. (And thus narrative was not a lie.) Added to that, and perhaps strangest of all, I noticed that as Smith pored over King’s speeches he at first resisted statements that contradicted his own experience of things — for example, the minister saying, “It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting heredity and environmental circumstances.” In learning, there was an inescapable moment of alienation and displacement, a plunge into uncertainty and insecurity in the new, the other; but then, miraculously, as he relaxed from resisting the revolution possible with each new perception, that interval of disorientation passed, and he found that no matter how far his mind had traveled, or how alien the data of knowledge might have seemed at first, he had in the end through these studies encountered only a dimension of himself.