The audience sang back, “Preach!”
“That’s right,” he went on, raising his right hand to tug at his earlobe, light spinning off his simple wedding band, “I’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to fear because after being in the storm so long I’ve learned to accept only one problem: What is God? Every night when I get down on my knees to pray or close my eyes in quiet meditation I’m holding a funeral for the self. I’m digging a little grave for the ego. I’m saying, like the lovely Catholic nun I read about who works with the poor in Calcutta, that I will despoil myself of all that is not God; I will strip my heart of every created thing; I will live in poverty and detachment; I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make myself a willing servant of the will of God. As Whitehead might put it, ‘I am’ is an example of Misplaced Concreteness. And what’s left when you get the I out of the way? Only the others, living and dead, who are already so thoroughly integrated into our lives you can never get rid of them. No, the segregationists lost before they even began. Nothing stands alone. You know, not one member of the White Citizens’ Council can finish breakfast in the morning without relying on the rest of the world. That sponge ‘Bull’ Connor bathes with came from the Pacific Islands. His towel was spun in Turkey. The coffee Orval Faubus drinks traveled all the way from South America, the tea from China, the cocoa from West Africa. And every time George Wallace or Malcolm X writes his name he’s using ink evolved from India and an alphabet inherited from the Romans, who derived it from the Greeks after they’d borrowed it from Phoenicians, who received their symbols from Seirites living on the Sinai peninsula between Egypt and Palestine … After a time, I tell you, a man comes to see only a We, this precious moment as a tissue in time holding past, future, and present, with all of us in the red, everlasting debtors — ontological thieves — in a universe of interrelatedness … Every man and woman is a speculum, our mirror. Our twin.”
Shivers played across my shoulders. The more I listened and looked, the more I suspected that it was Smith, not King, at the microphone, speaking to all gathered, yes, but in a way not to us at all — or, more exactly, to the spirit immanent in each parishioner, offering his speech as a form of sacrifice, holding nothing back, forgetting himself utterly in the demands of the moment and allowing the Father within him to doeth the work and the Father within us to receive it,
“Think about it.” He stroked his chin now, continuing without notecards or a single piece of paper in front of him. “We do everything we can to avoid facing ourselves and, by virtue of that, the real structure of reality, which Sir James Jeans, the physicist, tells us is more like a great thought than a machine driven by matter. Sir Arthur Eddington put it just as succinctly, saying — if I remember this right—‘The external world of physics has become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.’ Yet and still, most of us have carnal minds. Crude minds. We forget that nothing burns in hell except self-will. We seldom, if ever, think four-dimensionally. Lord, we hate to think at all, judging by how we spend our time. By the time most of you are sixty-five years old, you will have looked at 102,000 hours of television, heard 25,000 hours of radio, seen 300,000 comic pages and 3,599 movies, drunk 18,000 bottles of beer and 3,000 fifths of whiskey … and never devoted one hour to meditating on the truth that whatever is done to the least of us is done to all, and to the Lord we say we love. If you believe in Jesus, then you believe in the man who sleeps outside your door on the street. The single woman struggling to feed her children. The worker deprived of his job. You believe in the brokenhearted, the poor, the unemployed, the captive, the blind, the bruised. And all the countless outcasts tossed to one side by a society that values profits more than it does people. But I know that at the numinous heart of being, there is a Heart, a Father who, if we approach the poor by one span, will come to us by one cubit; if we move toward the needy one cubit, He draws nearer by a fathom; if we love all men as our brothers, He embraces us with a redemption greater than any fortune in the world. Brothers and sisters, Reverend Coleman, no man can make me hate. I have no choice but to love others because I am the others. Reason (to say nothing of self-interest) demands that I care for them as much as I do for myself.
“I should stop now, I suppose. A wise man once said, ‘Speech is always the great-grandson of truth’ … Thank you, and God bless you for your kindness.”
He back pedaled from the pulpit and bowed. Throughout the church there was silence. Moments later, thunderous applause. Parishioners sprang to their feet, throwing paper fans and programs into the air, shouting, pressing toward the stage. The older of the Wise Guys was talking to someone on his two-way radio, plugging his ear with one finger to muffle the calls for the speaker to give them more. I broke free from the spell his words had woven and scrambled from my position, heading back to the kitchen to congratulate Smith — once he pulled away from his admirers — on a stunning sermon that would have made King proud. But as I pushed open the side door, I saw our charge standing off to one side in the shadows — like a shadow himself, staring up at the stage where the parishioners hugged King (it had been him after all), shook his hand, posed to be in photos beside him, and clamored for his autograph. Who could doubt that this man had won his wings, his seat in Glory? Smith watched with perfect, everyman impotence and awe the love and admiration showered on his famous twin, seeing the Good but powerless to be it, lost in his littleness, and to me it seemed King’s double was undergoing a kind of living death in the great man’s presence, despite his intense training and desire to be remembered by God. Obviously, His children did not see Chaym in the shadows. Nor, I thought, would they ever.
I went to his side, placing my hand on his shoulder. Smith dropped his eyes, staring at his feet, almost as if he was ashamed of — and despised — his own being. “How does he do that?” He was not, I saw, talking to me. “Some of the things he said … That was my stuff. Not things I’ve ever said, but stuff I’ve felt. Like my spirit is trapped in his, which is so much clearer and bigger and cleaner. His voice … It feels when he’s preaching like his words come from inside me, not outside — like he gives my soul a voice. It doesn’t make sense …”
“C’mon,” I said. “I think we better go. It’s been a long day. We can stay at my apartment in the city tonight.” I asked Amy to bring the Chevelle around back, then nudged Smith toward the rear of the church so we could exit unseen, and I was so exhausted from the day’s events that I failed to notice the old man in the wrinkled K-Mart suit until he was upon us, and I was staring at a clump of brown clay with two chips of glass stuck in the center: his eyes. His cheap suit fit him miserably. His trousers dropped like drapery, not touching his wing tips but riding above his ankles and black socks so old the elastic was gone, leaving one, his left, bunched around his shoelaces. And he looked worse than his suit, sick and senile. I placed his age at seventy. Seventy-five.