In the last forty-eight hours, he’d survived a meeting with Richard Daley, from whom he’d won a few precious concessions (sprinklers attached to fire hydrants, swimming pool shipped to the West Side) that might defuse the potential for more rioting; then he’d gathered with gang members to sway them to the side of nonviolence, meetings so torn by conflict and shouting and hatred of the police that he had to make himself appear to be the person at fault in order to calm the others down. Having come through these crises, and with more to face, the man from whom the world expected everything, who sometimes went for days on four hours of sleep and rested fully only when he checked into a hospital, tried for a moment to nap, to step back from the severe discipline that black manhood called for in the twentieth century for just one precious moment in the sweltering heat of his Lawndale flat.
1
I knocked on his open bedroom door. “Doc?”
Rolling over, he crushed the lumpy pillow against his chest but kept his eyes closed, probably hoping whoever had come would go away, at least for a few moments more. Except for one other security person, we were alone in the apartment. His wife and children were staying at the home of Mahalia Jackson until the shooting died down. Later he would tell me he’d been dreaming of the sunset at Land’s End, that breathtaking stretch of beach on Cape Comorin in the Hindu state of Kerala, which struck him as the closest thing to paradise when he and Coretta traveled to India: he dreamed an ancient village of brown-skinned people (Africa was in their ancestry) who knew their lord Vishnu by a thousand names, for He was imminent in the sky and sand, wood and stone, masquerading as Many. He’d come to India not as celebrated civil rights leader but as a pilgrim. To learn. And though the promise of that pilgrimage was cut short when he plunged into the ongoing crisis back home, he had indeed learned much. Against the glorious sunset of Kerala, with the softest whisper of song carried on the wind from temples close by, Ahimsa paramo dharma, his wife took his hand and turned him to see the moon swell up from the sea, and in that evanescent instant, at the place where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal flowed together, he experienced an ineffable peace, and had never felt so free, and …
“Doc, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said into the darkness. Though the lamps were off, burning fires outside the window pintoed his bedroom wall. “There’s someone here to see you. I think you’d better take a look at him.”
When he looked toward the door, toward me, I knew what he saw: a twenty-four-year-old with the large, penetrating “frog eyes” of his friend James Baldwin behind a pair of granny glasses, dehydrating and dripping sweat in brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt weighted down by a battery of pencils and pens. I stepped into the room and walked directly to the window, looking down before I shut it on streets turned into combat zones as treacherous as any that year in Tay Ninh or Phnom Penh. The fuse: black kids cranking on fire hydrants. The flame: police trying to stop them. The consequence: a crowd that poured bricks and whiskey bottles and then ricocheting bullets from balconies and rooftops. It was not a night, July 17, to be out in bedlam unless you had to be. Firefighters dousing blazes set by roving street gangs had to be out there. Marksmen hunkered down behind their squad cars, praying that Governor Kerner would order, as promised, four thousand National Guardsmen into the city, had to be there — and so in a few short hours did the man whose sleep I had interrupted.
At the window, I could see two men shoot out the streetlight at the intersection of Sixteenth Street and South Hamlin. Their first shots missed the target; then at last one struck, plunging the corner into darkness. A sound of shattering glass came from the grocery store on Sixteenth Street. The pistol fire had been so close, just below the window, it changed air pressure inside the building, tightening my inner ear. Roving gangs were setting cars on fire. Light from the interiors of torched cars threw shadows like strokes of tar across the bedroom’s furnishings. Below the window figures darted furtively through the darkness, their colors and clans indistinguishable, slaying — or trying to slay — one another. I no longer knew on which side of this slaying I belonged. Or if there was any victory, pleasure, or Promised Land that could justify the killing and destruction of the past three nights.
I looked at the watch on my wrist. The luminous numerals read 8:15, but it felt more like midnight in the soul.
“Who is it?” The minister rubbed his eyes. “Is he here for the Agenda Committee meeting? Tell him I’ll be ready in just a minute—”
“No, sir. He’s outside in the hallway now. Reverend, I think you need to take a look at this.”
After swinging his feet to the floor, he sat hunched forward, both elbows on his knees, waiting for his head to clear. I noticed he wore no cross around his neck. Nor did he need one. With his shirt open, there in the bedroom’s heat, I could see the scar tissue shaped like a rood — a permanent one — over his heart, carved into his flesh by physician Aubre D. Maynard when he removed Izola Curry’s letter opener from his chest in Harlem Hospital. I knew he was tired, and I did not rush him. His staff had been working off-the-clock since the West Side went ballistic. He hadn’t slept in two days. Neither had I. All this night I’d drifted in and out of nausea, finding a clear space where I briefly felt fine, then as I heard the gunfire again, sirens, the sickness returned in spasms of dizziness, leaving me weak and overheated, then chilled.
He reached toward his nightstand for the wristwatch he’d left on top of a stack of books—The Writings of Saint Paul, Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy, Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ—alongside the sermon he was preparing for the coming Sunday. Typically, his sermons took two-thirds of a day to compose. In them his conclusions were never merely closures but always seemed to be fresh starting points. The best were classically formal, intentionally Pauline, cautious at the beginning like the first hesitant steps up a steep flight of stairs, then each carefully chosen refrain pushed it higher, faster, with mounting intensity, toward a crescendo that fused antique form and African rhythms, Old Testament imagery and America’s most cherished democratic ideals — principles dating back to the Magna Carta — into a shimmering creation, a synthesis so beautiful in the way his words alchemized the air in churches and cathedrals it could convert the wolf of Gubbio. He was, I realized again, a philosopher, which was something easy to forget (even for him) in a breathless year that began with the January murder of student Sammy Younge in Alabama, seventeen-year-old Jerome Huey beaten to death in Cicero in May, Fred Hubbard shot in April, Ben Chester White (Mississippi) and Clarence Triggs (Louisiana) killed by the Klan in June and July, the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond in February because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, Kwame Nkrumah deposed as Ghana’s leader the same month, then the slaughter of eight Chicago student nurses by a madman named Richard Speck. Not until I saw the books by his bed did I recall that in a less tumultuous time he taught Greek thought to a class of Morehouse students, among them Julian Bond, who testified that King, a freshly minted Ph.D., often looked up from his notes, closed his copy of Plato’s collected dialogues, and brought whole cloth out of his head passages from Socrates’ apology, emphasizing the seventy-one-year-old sage’s reply to his executioners, “I would never submit wrongly to any authority through fear of death, but would refuse even at the cost of my life.”