“You don’t think I’m good enough to give a speech here?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s what you meant,” he grumbled. “Shit, as long as he’s alive, I guess I’ll always be nothing.”
Amy cleared her throat to end the conversation. “Matthew, look in the rearview mirror.”
“Why?”
“Just look, will you?”
I cranked down my window and in the mirror affixed to the door saw a plain green Plymouth about five car-lengths behind us.
“Those Wise Guys,” said Smith, “have been baby-sittin’ us since we left Doc’s apartment. I recognize the plates. That’s a government car …”
Amy pressed her nose against the back window. “Why’re they following us?”
“I’ll give you three guesses,” said Smith, “and the first two don’t count. You gonna call this off?”
“No.” I slowed the car to a crawl. “I think I can circle around the block and lose them.”
Amy shook my shoulder. “Are you kiddin’? The church is straight ahead and — oh no, will you — will you look at that?”
The entire block from Dodge Avenue to Darrow was cordoned off. Vans from local radio and television stations were parked alongside the church, closed in by a crowd I estimated to be at five or six hundred. A traffic cop, young, still wearing his sunglasses though it was twilight, waved vehicles west up Emerson Street toward Skokie. I slowed the Chevelle even more, rolled down my window, told the cop I was bringing the minister for tonight’s service, then turned right toward the church when he let me through. The green Plymouth eased toward the curb at the end of the block. Sunlight was fading fast. I couldn’t clearly see the faces of the men following us, and then there was no time to think about them because Calvary AME’s pastor, Rev. Jacob Coleman, a tidy-looking, tea-colored man with a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole who’d been waiting inside the door, rushed outside. He took Smith by the arm, explaining that his ushers would provide security, and led us through people trying to touch or detain the man they thought was King to the rear of the church.
Inside a tiny kitchen behind the main room, Smith began to unravel. I should have seen it coming. I should have known. When the magnitude of what the minister asked us to do finally dawned on him, when he was at last standing at the door of his first real performance as a double, Smith collapsed heavily onto a wooden folding chair and began mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. His breathing was ragged, asthmatic. Suddenly he began hiccuping uncontrollably, almost strangling, and looked helplessly toward Amy. I knew she was thinking the same as me. It was over. He was ready for riding in decoy cars, for drawing fire away from King, but not for standing before an audience of over five hundred of the genuinely faithful … He was going to crash and burn, as he’d always done in the Citivas Dei. Blow this operation wide open. Fall on his face and embarrass us all. Or worse, pass out right there in the kitchen in front of Calvary AME’s ushers and clergy.
“Is something wrong?” Rev. Coleman asked.
Amy eased herself between the pastor and Smith. “Give us a few minutes alone, okay? He just needs to compose himself before he gets his cue.”
Reluctantly Rev. Coleman cleared the kitchen, leaving Amy and Smith to themselves.
I left through a side door and joined the congregation, taking a spot to the right of the pulpit. I scanned the crowd, my eyes tracking packed wooden pews in the northeast corner to the laity filling the seats and aisles in front of me, men in their best (and only) dark suits brought out from the back of their closets every Sunday or for occasions such as this, their brogans shined and buffed the night before, cooling themselves with fans provided on the back of each bench, their wives, bearing names such as Adella, Inell, and Luberta, sitting quietly beside them in light cotton dresses, some wearing gloves despite the heat of bodies packed so close together on the benches, perspiration just beginning to bead on their foreheads, dampening at the root oil-heavy hairdos subjected earlier in the day to the straightening comb; I picked out Robert Jackson, a dignified, immaculately dressed, balding Negro sitting on the bench he bought at Calvary, then to his right another old man in a rimpled K-Mart suit, holding a wide-brimmed hat on his lap. My eyes moved up, up above them, to a triptych of stained-glass windows on the western wall, one depicting an alb-clad Jesus standing before Herod’s jeering soldiers in the praetorium, another showing Jesus during his lonely vigil of fasting in the desert, the large middle painting portraying a mob hanging him from the cross, and though I knew I was supposed to be watching the crowd, scanning the room every few seconds, my eyes never resting anywhere for long because who knew where an assassin might appear, the feeling that always flooded through me when I entered Negro churches came over me again — the sense, right or wrong, that for the briefest of moments I was safe from the ravages, the irreality, the racial stupidities of the world outside Calvary’s doors, that no harm could befall anyone here where so much of value was preserved, meaning made manifest in the minutest details by black people who came to this place, sacred and set off from the chaos of the streets outside, to find husbands and wives, to baptize their children, and to bury their dead before gathering at the home of the deceased, sharing memories of her with the survivors, and being fed by her friends and neighbors who filled the kitchen table with food as a reminder that the bereaved must take nourishment, no matter if they were hungry or not, and walk on, and know that death was not final, because Jesus conquered that once and for all, so yes, eat and be joyful even in mourning because no Christian should forget the good news of the gospel, and no believer in Him ever feel alone or have cause for despair. From my childhood came a verse, Nevermore thou needest seek Me / I am with thee everywhere: / Raise the stone and thou shalt find Me / Cleave the wood and I am there. This was what Calvary’s congregation believed. What I had been taught from the time I could walk. Religion (Latin religare, “to bind,” or bring together those things broken, torn asunder). But was all this, I wondered, an illusion? Badly I wanted to believe, as they did. Behind me I heard twenty teenage girls in white blouses and black skirts blending their voices in the opening hymn, “Amazing Grace,” wringing that song out so thoroughly it outstripped anything on WVON’s “Top Forty.” An old woman who favored Helen Martin about the face stroked the keys of an ancient piano, and while I did not know if her faith was ill-founded, I did know it was here — and only here, in the Negro church, for the last hundred years — that black people pooled their money in order to send the congregation’s best students on to train at schools like Morehouse and Fisk; here that teachers selflessly used their weekends and nights to tutor children and conduct Sunday-school classes that, beginning with the Bible, branched out forward and back in the better seminars to examine the preconditions for Christianity and all the intellectual and scientific traditions it had influenced from Tertullian to quantum physics; here that a young Romare Bearden encountered the cornucopia of styles and forms — in spirituals, hymns, prayers, and sermons — that opened him to the epic dialogue that was art; and here, finally, that the civil rights movement was nurtured and sustained, prayer and racial politics inseparably melded by clergy, stewards, and trustees who, if they knew nothing else, understood that they served their people best by reminding them again and again that their political and racial struggles were but the backdrop against which a far greater spiritual odyssey was unfolding, and that no worldly triumph deserved hallelujahs if in their secular victories they somehow lost their souls.