For a moment, the minister looked faint. His right hand reached for the back of a kitchen chair to anchor the spinning room and steady himself. He took a deep breath, then shook his visitor’s hand and motioned for him to sit down at the table. “When they said I needed to see you, I had no idea—”
Smith’s lips lifted ever so slightly at the corners. “Thank you for taking the time to see somebody like me, Reverend. I know you busy. But, I swear, ever since nineteen fifty-four, people been telling me I got a twin. Looks is about all we got in common, though. People love you. Especially white people. Sometimes”—he laughed again, at himself it seemed—“I figured God flicked up and missed with me, but He had you for backup.” Smith peered down at his hands, squeezing them together. A dollop of sweat slid from his hairline down his cheek to his chin, and suddenly I had the feeling he was acting, playing a role he’d rehearsed many times, even using black English — a pâté of urban slang and southern idioms — playfully, as one would a toy. “I’ve read your books. Everything I could about you. Caught you on TV more times than I can count. So when I heard you were in Chicago, I figured I had to come by and at least shake your hand.”
“You live here, then?” asked King.
“All my life, mainly on the South Side. That’s where I grew up, in one of the county’s juvenile homes. I reckon I been everywhere and done a li’l bit of everything. Most of it”—he laughed again—“come to a whole lot of nothing. Not like with you. I went in the service when I was twenty, the year after Truman signed Executive Order 9981. That put me right in the middle of Korea, but I was lucky, you know? I cruised through two years without a scratch. Guess it was ’cause I was on my knees every night, praying God’d get me outta there safely. See, I trusted Him. That’s how I was raised. ’Bout a month before I was to fly home, I was filling out college entrance forms. Day before my plane left, I walked outside the base to celebrate with a buddy of mine named Stackhouse and smoke a li’l Korean boo — and what you think! My boot-heel came right down on a land mine. I left part of my leg — and all of Stackhouse — back in Pyongyang.”
Smith lifted his left trouser leg, and my stomach lurched. The sweep of his shin was crooked. Brown flesh below the knob of his knee was twisted, muscleless, blackened as crisp and crinkly as cellophane. Amy’s hands flew to her lips, stifling a moan. And then, suddenly, Smith looked straight at me, flashing that ironical, almost erotic smirk again, as if somehow we were co-conspirators, or maybe he knew something scandalous about me, though we’d met only minutes earlier.
“The doctors spent a year rebuilding that from the femur to the metatarsal. My jaws were wired for months. Reverend, I tell you, after that — after my discharge — I just drifted and drank. I stayed in the East, sorta like being in exile, till I healed. I knew every bartender by his first name in Kyoto, Jakarta, and Rangoon. Finally come back to the States, and got me a li’l room at 3721 Indiana Avenue, and I was doin’ okay for a while, trying to stay dry and go to school over at Moody Bible Institute — I always wanted to preach — then things kinda … fell apart for me again …”
The minister bent forward, squeezing his hands, unaware he was mirroring perfectly Smith’s posture. “How do you mean?”
Smith drew a deep breath. (King took one too, as if slowly they were slipping into synchronization.) “I ain’t sure what happened. I don’t look for trouble, sir, but sometimes trouble just comes looking for me. Maybe it’s bad karma, or something’s wrong with my ch’i like they say in the East, I can’t figure it.”
He was working nights as a custodian, said Chaym Smith, and taking classes in the day. Back then he was an insatiable reader, the sort of autodidact who (like Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman) could absorb whole paragraphs at a single glance; his recall was so good he barely had to study for his exams. Sometimes when he came home three young boys — Powell, Jay, and Lester — would be playing on the steps or directly in front of the building in the street. They were good kids, he thought. Wild, but that was because each of them had a different father. In effect, no father. And with no Daddy, they saw everything — and anything — as permissible. He knew what that was, not knowing your father, but feeling that the indifferent sonuvabitch who brought you into the world was out there somewhere, faceless and unreachable, silent and remote, someone you needed and hated all at the same time until the moment came that you damned him, renounced Him, and moved on. Nearly every day Smith saw those boys, and he liked them — he bought the trio candy and Tales of the Unexpected comic books at the corner store, shot a few hoops with them on Saturday when he was tired of studying, and after getting permission from their mother, Juanita Lomax, who was young and pretty and seemed to like him whenever she bumped into Smith in the hallway, he drove them in his battered secondhand Corvair to see Sidney Poitier’s portrayal of a black soldier in Korea in All the Young Men. It reminded him of his time in Korea, and he hoped Juanita’s boys would pick up something positive from Poitier’s performance, though he couldn’t be sure they had, given the way Powell and Jay hooted and threw popcorn at the screen when Alan Ladd’s bigoted character came on. Still, they told him they’d had a great evening when Smith brought them back to their mother’s basement apartment.
As it turned out, Juanita was not there when he brought her boys home. Thing is, this was nothing new. Often she left them alone to fend for and feed themselves, usually potatoes, which they peeled with a pocketknife, threw into a handleless skillet in the closet-sized kitchen, then proceeded to burn until the four dark, below-ground rooms, which always smelled damp, clouded with smoke. Smith always worried they’d set the place on fire. That night, however, he’d filled their stomachs at White Castle, so he was sure they’d do no cooking and go straight to bed.
His own tiny but tidy room was three flights up, one of the front bedrooms in a flat rented by Vera Thomas — a kind, brown-skinned woman about thirty — and her mother, an elderly woman who often said she wished he, Smith, had been her son, what with the way he studied and worked so hard after he got out of the service, and him with a disability too. Smith said he turned his key in the door and walked through the darkened living room — it was by then nearly midnight — then entered his bedroom, clicking on the light. Under his covers, wearing only a smile, was Juanita. Vera, she said, let her into his room when she explained he was out with her boys. She had something to give him to express her thanks for his being so kind to her kids. He asked her what that was. She said, Come here and see. Although he could not remember undressing, or the details of what he said — or might have promised her — Smith spent that night under the covers with Juanita Lomax.
The next week he was in court.
How he got there even he couldn’t rightly say. The police had picked him up on his job. Later he learned that Juanita had sworn on a stack of Bibles that he’d forced himself on her. Fortunately for Smith, this was not a case the judge wanted to hear. Juanita argued — as she had twice earlier in the same court — that he was obliged to make her an honorable woman. No, the judge said, he would have to do nothing of the kind. He lectured Juanita not to take up the court’s time this way again, but once they were outside again on the street, her waiting at the bus stop and crying, he stepped up behind her and said yes, he would marry her, if that was what she wanted.