“I think you’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said.
Yes, he was far more than she’d expected.
And he could not keep his eyes off her. That day she was wearing bangs with a natural wave. That he liked. Indeed, he liked everything about her, even though he knew he would have to confront Daddy King head-on — a thing he dreaded more than anything else — when he brought this stunning woman, who was not one of Ebenezer’s own, home and introduced her as his fiancée. “You,” he told her, “are my Waterloo.”
No man, he knew, would ever have a better companion by his side. When they were married in Alabama on June 18, 1953, the local Jim Crow laws prohibited them from spending their wedding night in a hotel. Instead they found lodging at a black funeral home. Yes, they had been through much together. As in most traditional, black southern Baptist households, she followed his lead, going so far as to let him tell her how she should dress or when she should fix herself up a little. If these were faults — failures in his understanding of equality — he regretted them, because in those early years of their marriage he felt liberated by her to at last be himself. He owed her that, an intimacy he’d never experienced before, one possible only through the strange alchemy of marriage, where two once separate and distinct histories blended to become a single destiny. True, he learned that this kind of love involved suffering, the extinction of the ego, but the trade-off, especially after the children were born, was his rebirth as a fully communal being, a man working in concert with another for the welfare of his family, which reinforced his passion for politics and social justice. In his later speeches, the ones assailing America’s crass and vulgar materialism, he was fond of saying, “The great problem facing modern man is that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.” What he didn’t say — and now wondered if he should have — was that through Coretta’s love he’d come to know that ecstatic freedom and the fullness of being-with.
He wondered how badly she’d been hurt by the stories about his sexual affairs. There were women all over the country who claimed they’d known his affections. The rumor mill thrived on tales about the Kennedy brothers, or Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, according to a widely circulated and probably false report, unzipped his pants during a White House meeting and dropped his Texas-sized member on the conference table, asking, “Does Ho Chi Minh have one of these?” Because the public loved stones like these about the famous and powerful he was not surprised to hear them said about himself. But did any of his detractors stop once to admit that these stories about his wearing sunglasses and meeting women at a restaurant in Riverdale, and soliciting prostitutes, were all secondhand? Anything that came from the FBI — their saying, for example, that the wife of a California dentist was his mistress — was tainted, given their campaign to discredit him at any cost, first as a Communist, then later as a lecher. In the public’s eyes, however, accusation was equivalent to proof. His wife dismissed them. He could not. They forced him to reconsider the vows he’d taken when he was nineteen. He was by no means an ethical relativist. Indeed, the very thought of that angered him. But maybe — just maybe — what he preached to others was impossible. Surely the commandments applied to him as a Christian minister. It would always be that way. The nonbeliever might not be judged or condemned or hurled into hell, but those who took spiritual vows — and them only — were subject to the narrow system, the “razors edge,” as some called it, of punishment and redemption. Consequence was reserved only for spiritual aspirants. These could not afford the slightest hint of moral failure, not a moment of weakness lest that be used against their cause. How did the old churchwomen put it? Dirt shows the quickest on the cleanest cotton. And if nothing could be found, they would have to live with misdeeds fabricated and passed along to reporters who received “information” on him from the government’s Crime Records Division. And in the horrible tape of a party in his hotel room, which his wife found at the SCLC’s office, mailed by a Bureau agent in November of 1964 from Miami, just thirty-four days before he was to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. He’d been at that raucous party, yes. People there told dirty jokes. A listener could conclude there was sexual activity in the room, but nothing — absolutely nothing — on the tape directly implicated him. His voice could barely be heard in the room. So Hoover ordered his lab to enhance his words a little, and when the supposedly damaging tape reached his wife it came with a letter that said: “Look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes … You could have been our greatest leader … But you are done … There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
Many nights when he lay beside his wife, unable to sleep, he did want to put a gun to his head. To his congregation he’d said, “There is a Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll in us,” and not once did he exclude himself from the realm of sinners, though more than anything else in this world he wanted to be a good man.
One thing — one poem — often steadied him during these nights of despair, lines composed four centuries earlier by his (and his father’s) namesake, Martin Luther:
This life, therefore
is not righteousness
but growth in righteousness
not health but healing
not being but becoming
not rest but exercise.
We are not yet what we shall be
but we are growing toward it.
The process is not yet finished
but it is going on,
this is not the end
but it is the road.
All does not gleam in glory
but all is being purified.
Dexter cracked open his workroom door, holding a football. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I thought you were done working.”
“I am, but I’m finished,” he said. “At least for now.”
His son crossed the room, grabbing two of his fingers, and began pulling him outside toward the living room to play. He knew he would give his children this time, regardless of whether they kept him away from his work all evening. They were the Lord’s children, after all, and just as he was the channel for the gospel and not its source, he and his wife were merely the children’s temporary custodians. He knew he had let them down time and again. But Scripture said if a man tried — and kept trying — to serve the good, the true, and the beautiful, Providence would not turn its back. No man, he knew, was given burdens too great for him to carry; indeed, the point was to pass beyond the vanity that he, not God, bore that burden, and realize, even if he had to learn it the hard way and at almost a fatal price, that the challenge of the spiritual was simply this: to be good, truly moral, and in control of oneself for this moment only, because what other moment in time could a man be held responsible for?