At Calvary’s crowded entrance I saw the Wise Guys.
There were two of them, one a hairless, pursy, middle-aged little man in horn-rimmed glasses, slow-moving as a turtle, his belly bubbling over his belt. The other was Titian-haired, thin, in his twenties, his profile made birdlike by a hawkbill nose, carrying a notepad he scribbled on in shorthand, never looking down at the page. They looked tired; they kept shifting their weight from one leg to the other, as if maybe their feet hurt. In another context they might have been Mormons working a neighborhood, tramping from door to door. These were the ones who followed us from the West Side, whom I’d seen on the road in rural Illinois, and who now no doubt were taking down names. They looked intensely interested when the audience rose to its feet and erupted into clapping and cheers.
Amy walked in behind King — it most certainly was King, not Chaym Smith — from the kitchen to a row of seats on the stage. I had no idea how the minister had gotten here at the last minute, but I muttered thanks to the Almighty, for the prayer I’d made had come to pass, and I released my breath, which I felt I’d been holding for hours.
And then the audience settled down. Whether the minister knew it or not, his physical presence, while not imposing, brought a hush like soft background music, or as if someone cracked a window in a crowded, smoke-filled room. I felt something in him sorely lacking in myself — grace or a spiritual wealth so great he could give of himself endlessly, and always there was twelve basketfuls left over, as one might dip a cup into the sea and never see it emptied. He was an old soul. Centuries old. Not putting on a show, he stopped all conversation and commanded respect; not justifying himself, he was distinguished; not boasting, he was instantly acknowledged. Standing beside Rev. Coleman at the forest of black microphones on the pulpit, with flashbulbs exploding like fireworks in the hands of the Associated Press and British newsmen who rushed to the front of the church, he was august, hugely present, relaxed, munificent, established in mercy, but at his center I felt a cemetery — a coolness and crypt — in which all regard for himself and his safety lay buried. Something in him was dead, extinguished so long ago during the Montgomery boycott when he was hardly more than a boy that it no longer even existed in memory In some way that I could not coax into clarity, his very presence challenged me and commented, without his having yet said a word, on my own staggering shortcomings as a man, a Negro, a Christian. The level he was living on did that. No newspaper article or television interview touched what I felt that evening. To engage him at all, this preacher who dared to say, “There will be no permanent end to the race problem until oppressed men develop the capacity to love their enemies,” who quoted Epictetus, Keats, Emerson, and Dunbar as if they were his first cousins — to meet him face-to-face, I realized, forced a man to kick up his own thoughts and feelings a notch or two, as you might when going one-on-one with the finest athletes on a playing field, so that even mediocre men like me rose momentarily to finer planes of performance.
“It is with great pleasure,” said Rev. Coleman, “that I present this Achievement Award to you from the grateful membership of Calvary AME Church.” He handed a heavy plaque, gold lettering engraved on black, to the minister and shook his hand vigorously; then, smiling, Coleman turned the ceremony over to King.
I should have been watching the crowd, but I could not wrench my eyes away as King, the portrait of composure that evening, despite all he’d endured only hours earlier, placed the plaque to one side on a small table of flowers, his movements as flawless as those of a fish, his fingers seeming to merge with the surface of the pulpit. More than any place else, he was at home there, in the pulpit, leaning into the microphones, having preached since his teens beside his father, and then during his college years in the Baptist churches of King Senior’s friends in Boston and throughout the South, incorporating the best of what he learned from Mays and Brightman in their classrooms into sermons he thrilled audiences with — in his early twenties — the very next Sunday. How had he put it in one sermon? “As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow. But to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” He never knew — could never know — exactly what the room he was to speak in would look like. For the briefest of instants, the length of an Amen, he adjusted his voice to the room’s unique acoustics and the placement of the stage. He got through these engagements, for which he was paid between $500 and $1,000, by focusing exclusively on the present moment, living completely in the here, the now, oblivious to whatever programs he had scheduled for the next day, willfully forgetful of how well or poorly he’d done before. His experience of time was reduced, on the road, to seriality, fully lived moments — like islands — separate from one another: he was here (Chicago) and here (Jamaica) and here (Paris) with little bridge between locations. Some days it felt as if his life dissolved or abruptly cut from place to place, as in a film.
Fortunately, he didn’t truly need notes anymore. He’d done this so often before that he could speak for two hours or three without once looking down. The quotations he needed were permanently imprinted in his memory. All he need do was “switch,” as he put it to himself, into a public mode, and the words, one whole structured paragraph after another, came pouring out of him. In his teens, when speaking became effortless this way, he’d wonder after an event, “Did I really do that?” because his public self had seemed so different to him, like a mask; but then he realized some few years later that man and mask were fused. His private self was the mask. The Movement left no room for subjectivity; inner and outer were the same.
“Thank you … thank you very much,” he said as he glanced around the church, making visual contact with everyone, including those crammed into the balconies. “A moment ago, Reverend Coleman asked me if I was disillusioned after today’s march. He asked me if I felt we were wrong to come to Chicago, and what did I make of the hatred we saw in Marquette Park. Now, I can’t lie to you. I was stunned. In every one of those screaming white faces I saw hatred that obliterated the last vestiges of humanity. I saw sickness and evil brought on by segregation and sinruined lives. Because, you see, those people were living in fear. They were afraid that accepting Negroes as their neighbors — or anybody different — meant they’d lose their homes, their jobs, their place in society, possibly even their sons and daughters in marriage to people who don’t look the way they do. They feared losing their sense of self, and we all know that’s the most powerful fear on earth, the one that fuels all the others. Fear, I’ve been told, is a drug — it releases peptide hormones that have the same pharmacologie characteristics as opium. You could say that anyone experiencing fear is narcoticized, not in his right mind, mesmerized, in the constant state of hypnosis so many metaphysicians tell us is the human condition. That’s what I saw today. People throwing bricks at phantoms. Shouting at shadows, since there are no Negroes, and whites either, except of course in their own deluded minds …
“After liberating lunch counters, winning court battles and homes in nice neighborhoods, we must in our next campaign free consciousness itself from fear, from what William Blake called ‘mind-forg’d manacles.’ But to do this we must unlearn many things. We must be quiet and not deluded or deceived by the creations of our own minds. The soil of the soul must be plowed. Reverend Coleman”—he squinted behind him at the pastor sitting rapt beside Amy—“the answer to your question is that no man can bring me so low as to make me hate him, no matter what we ran up against today in Chicago, because hate is based on fear, and I don’t fear losing anything since I willingly gave up everything to the one I love.”