~ ~ ~
Pulled from the crowd, the teenage boy hears Jasmine — leaning close to his face — whisper in his ear a single word; and though Jasmine wouldn’t dispute that she did so, she has no distinct recollection of it though it isn’t a word that would surprise either of them if they could relive the moment, stop and catch the word in the air and hear it again.
There’s more than one of me, she said to him that afternoon months before, back in the capitol, and he answered, “Try being me,” and she sees all the versions of him in the room of an Indianapolis Marriott on an early-April night of murder that can’t help feeling to everyone like a foretelling. The network reportage from the television in the other room is on a kind of loop, delivering the same news over and over so as to try and shake off the shock of it; and dozing on the bedroom floor she still can hear people crying in other parts of the suite but she’s moved most by the silence from outside, since alone among all cities tonight, on this particular night this particular city isn’t gripped by riot because the man who lies on the bed a few feet away in the same room dared to go break the news to a black crowd in the ghetto a few hours ago, a few miles away.
~ ~ ~
It was cold that night but the rain was fine and dry like ash blown in from the southwest all its way from that motel balcony in Memphis, and the torchlight was still the red haze of the mind’s fires not yet lit. When they first drove up to the rally it wasn’t clear how many had heard the news, only that most hadn’t, especially those who came early so they could be within touching distance, or spitting distance a few feet back, or shooting distance a few more feet back.
An aide hurriedly scribbled some brief remarks for him—and then please Senator let’s get the fuck out of here. But stepping from the car, taking the first step up to the platform to address everyone, each and every face before him black, he crumpled the speech and stuck it in his overcoat pocket and just went up and told them. He’s dead. Shot and killed tonight, he told them — and then he talked not for a minute or two or five but nearly ten, talked over the roar of gunfire heard in his mind’s ear four and a half years since Dallas, “so go home tonight,” he told them, “and yes say a prayer for Dr. King and his family, but say one too for our country that we love,” and for those close enough to see, the pain in his eyes was his passport to theirs, the signal of truth and his right to say it and theirs to hear it.
~ ~ ~
Then however many hours later it is, from her place on the floor in the room at the Marriott she can’t tell at first if he sleeps or just stares at the ceiling. Nevertheless all his versions of himself are there on the bed with him: that man of thoughtless courage who broke the news to the ghetto tonight; the man who presumed in such a mean moment to quote Greek poets and call for the taming of men’s savagery and making gentle the life of the world; the petty man possessive of his own calamitous heartbreaks who afterward admonished those around him for their sorrow, snapping that this wasn’t the greatest tragedy in the history of the Republic, as though this murder of a black Atlanta preacher had the temerity to move anyone as much as another of a president fifty-five months earlier; the blunt man who practically spat at Jasmine in the early morning London hours “South Africa” as though to provoke her, as though to dare her to engage his conscience and expose her own; the guilty man remembering that in another life not so long ago he approved electronic surveillance of the black preacher now dead in Memphis; the stirred man who called the victim’s widow to offer solace, a word he prefers to “comfort” because it sounds less secular; the newly afraid man, corpses of fears he hoped he had killed still fresh, maybe not even corpses. The man who hears the echo of a future already fired and on its trajectory.
~ ~ ~
All of the versions of him lie there on the bed and then she hears one of them in the room’s fading light. “The pain. The pain that can’t forget,” he says, “must find a way to rain forgiveness on the heart until there grows a wisdom and grace as close to God’s as we can manage. The Negro in this country understands the country’s promise better than anyone because he’s felt its betrayal. I don’t have the right to ask them to believe me. No white politician does. Six years ago when I was Attorney General and the Freedom Riders took their buses into Alabama and they were beaten and hosed down and run down by dogs and they asked me to protect them, I just wanted them to stop making trouble. Just stop, I said. You’re making trouble! Don’t be in a hurry! That seems a different life now. That man. . seems a different man, or I hope he is, anyway. So many times in this country, faith has been asked of the children of slaves to only dishonest and treacherous ends. The children of slaves took a leap of faith six years ago out on that Mall in the shadow of our most haunting memorial and now, now that he’s been shot down, we ask them to take another leap. If it’s true that the promise of this country can’t be kept until white begs the forgiveness of black, it’s as true that the promise can’t be kept until the black man decides whether to extend that forgiveness — and slavery’s child is under no obligation to do that. In our hearts on which rains the pain that we can’t forget, we know that. Who knows how such a thing can happen, the request for forgiveness and the granting of it? What historic moment can represent that? A black man or woman someday running, perhaps, for the office that I run for now? But we can’t tell the slave’s child whether to forgive. We can’t pretend it’s incumbent on blacks to do that. One more time the fate of the country and its meaning is in the same black hands that built the White House, the same hearts broken in the country’s name. We’ll be only as good a country as the black man and woman and child allows and only as redeemed as black allows white to redeem itself. But the slave’s child owes no one that redemption.”
All the versions of him collapsing into his exhausted frame, he says, “I know it could have been me. Everyone knows that. No one knows it better than I. Perhaps if it were, it would have mattered as much, perhaps not. Perhaps it would have been better.”
“Don’t,” she whispers.
“I don’t know how much time I have,” he says, “to become the person that I hope I am.”
~ ~ ~
One night on the campaign train she overhears one of the reporters say, “Someone’s going to kill him too.” She’s passing through the press car when the reporter says it over a shot of bourbon and a hand of cards where black Jacks are wild, and it stops her in her tracks.