No doubt my behavior baffled her (which was nothing new). Like so many in the Movement, Amy was strong, serious, sure of herself and what things meant in the world. She was an Abelite, lost to ambiguity. I cannot lie; I loved her still. I’d believed that as Aquinas, that intractable Aristotelian, put it, a pious woman might lead a man to the Lord. Saint John of the Cross said it just as well, amado con amada. She might be his salvation, if he wedded his will to hers. (Clearly, this worked for King’s father.) But I knew my love would never be returned. This asymmetry was not entirely unsatisfying. Because of Smith, I began to accept the sad inevitability of myself. With not being able to take sides (when one’s choices were miserable). With the mark of loneliness, ipseity, Socratic doubts, interiority, and always having an afterthought. I felt at ease with (and less apologetic for) my bookishness, my inclination toward irony, and my sense that the world as it was, was unacceptable; I’d settled on the fact that perhaps I lived best as a witness who withdrew and gained distance in order to become truly engaged. Still, I recognized something I loved in the community of the certain, the blessed, but thanks to Smith I hankered for it a little less than before and knew that whatever liberation I might look forward to was in my hands alone.
And there is also this to say:
I began to fear we were being watched. Although I said nothing to the others, late some nights a plain green Plymouth rolled up the road toward the farmhouse. Its headlights were off. The driver sat for long minutes, and I saw smoke spiraling up through one side window. We were miles from town; I wondered: Who would come this far? Whenever I rose from bed and ran barefoot to the road, the Plymouth’s engine started, and the car was gone before I got there, nothing remaining of its presence except tire marks and black dottle from someone’s pipe.
As I said, I did not want to frighten the others. Instead, I asked Smith to walk with me, just to get him away from his regimen of reading, to Giant City State Park, through the enclosure known as the Stone Fort, which once served as a site for Indian ceremonial purposes at the top of an eightyfoot stone cliff. As we walked I tried to convey capsule descriptions of existentialist theologians germane to the minister’s intellectual genesis, and what little I’d gleaned from a hasty perusal of Edgar Brightman. Of Personalism there was precious little to say. Had King not written about its value to him in reinforcing his belief in a loving, divine Father on high when he was in college (in contrast to Paul Tillich’s monistic, impersonal God as the “Ground of Being”), Personalism as a philosophy would be as dead as Neoplatonism. None of the abstract portraits of the Lord offered by Tillich, Plotinus, Spinoza, or Eastern mystics could satisfy a Baptist preacher’s boy. Thus the Boston Personalists, and Crozer professor L. Harold DeWolf’s conception of a self-limited, temporal Father who bore man’s face and flaws, hopes and values, impacted on Kings vision more than any other; if Martin imagined the Lord, the odds were good that He looked (and behaved) more than a little like Daddy King. For DeWolf, God was immersed in creation, His power willingly curtailed by human freedom. He was not a prescient deity. His holiness was entangled in the bloody advance of history. Future events unfolding in this intentionally less than best of all possible worlds might take Him by surprise. He did not will suffering. Evil on earth was beyond his control, but in the Father’s contract with His children, evil was an opportunity for spiritual growth and triumph. The Devil could not prevail, for as man struggled from innocence through sin to redemption he waged a war on His behalf to realize history’s goal of the Heavenly City, the kingdom. King, I explained, accepted some restrictions on God’s power, but could not — would not — believe for a second that He lacked absolute control of events predestined to lead to social liberation and the beloved community.
On our way back to the Nest, tramping along quietly at my side with his hands folded across his midsection (a carry-over from his temple training, the position known as shashu, “forked hands”), his brow furrowed, Smith was brooding. Out of the corner of my eye, I checked him, uneasy by how now he seemed more like the minister than before. “I’m starting to see something,” he said. “Martin don’t hold back nothing for himself.” We tramped on, his silence freighted as he wrestled with his thoughts. “He’s about total surrender, giving it all to God. I been trying to get a handle on him, but sometimes it’s like he ain’t there. Like he’s an instrument, not the music itself — a conduit for something else that’s always just outta my reach.”
“Do you have faith?” I asked.
“What?”
“I said, do you have faith, Chaym?”
“Naw.” His brow tightened. “None. How could I? If you’re saying that’s why I’ve got the shell but not the substance, fuck you, Bishop. There’s nothing but shell, far as I can see. And I’m ready now. You understand? I can do anything he does. Just watch me — and I’ll fucking do it better.”
The call from Doc came on August 4.
Routinely, I’d driven into Carbondale to phone the Lawndale flat, report on Smith’s progress, and keep abreast of the campaign in Chicago. The minister, whose voice was flat and tired, as if he could barely stay awake, asked if we could return for the Marquette march. In the background I heard arguing, voices I could not identify, but the heart of this contentious discussion seemed to center on the escalating backlash against King’s lieutenants, some of them having picketed real estate agencies in the Belmont-Cragin area, and for their trouble saw their parked cars set on fire. SCLC and CCCO workers were at the end of their patience. When King was away, Andrew Young and Al Raby led fifteen hundred demonstrators (they were still falling far short of the turnout they needed) into an Irish-Lithuanian neighborhood near Marquette Park on July 30. The marchers were heckled by residents waving Confederate flags and homemade signs reading NIGGER, HOW YOU WISH YOU WERE WHITE and SEGREGATION IS GOD’S PLAN. Their parked cars were pushed into a lagoon. Predictably, the Chicago police were no help whatsoever. Their cousins and kin lived in these all-white enclaves; after pushing irate white residents into wagons with CENTRAL DETENTION SERVICE labeled on their rear doors they drove them a few blocks away and set them free. Those neighborhoods were explosive, someone in the rundown flat told King. A powder keg waiting to be lit. The minister excused himself, asking me to hold, and I heard him say he agreed the moment was right for confrontation.