Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award.
Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award.
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Overview
Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780684854434 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 02/02/1999 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Chapter One
I knocked on his open bedroom door. "Doc?"
Rolling over, he crushed the lumpy pillow against his chest but kept his eyes closed, probably hoping whoever had come would go away, at least for a few moments more. Except for one other security person, we were alone in the apartment. His wife and children were staying at the home of Mahalia Jackson until the shooting died down. Later he would tell me he'd been dreaming of the sunset at Land's End, that breathtaking stretch of beach on Cape Comorin in the Hindu state of Kerala, which struck him as the closest thing to paradise when he and Coretta traveled to India: he dreamed an ancient village of brown-skinned people (Africa was in their ancestry) who knew their lord Vishnu by a thousand names, for He was imminent in the sky and sand, wood and stone, masquerading as Many. He'd come to India not as a celebrated civil rights leader but as a pilgrim. To learn. And though the promise of that pilgrimage was cut short when he plunged into the ongoing crisis back home, he had indeed learned much. Against the glorious sunset of Kerala, with the softest whisper of song carried on the wind from temples close by, Ahimsa paramo dharma, his wife took his hand and turned him to see the moon swell up from the sea, and in that evanescent instant, at the place where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal flowed together, he experienced an ineffable peace, and had never felt so free, and ...
"Doc, I'm sorry to bother you," I said into the darkness. Though the lamps were off, burning fires outside the window pintoed his bedroomwall. "There's someone here to see you. I think you'd better take a look at him."
When he looked toward the door, toward me, I knew what he saw: a twenty-four-year-old with the large, penetrating "frog eyes" of his friend James Baldwin behind a pair of granny glasses, dehydrating and dripping sweat in brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt weighted down by a battery of pencils and pens. I stepped into the room and walked directly to the window, looking down before I shut it on streets turned into combat zones as treacherous as any that year in Tay Ninh or Phnom Penh. The fuse: black kids cranking on fire hydrants. The flame: police trying to stop them. The consequence: a crowd that poured bricks and whiskey bottles and then ricocheting bullets from balconies and rooftops. It was not a night, July 17, to be out in bedlam unless you had to be. Firefighters dousing blazes set by roving street gangs had to be out there. Marksmen hunkered down behind their squad cars, praying that Governor Kerner would order, as promised, four thousand National Guardsmen into the city, had to be there—and so in a few short hours did the man whose sleep I had interrupted.
At the window, I could see two men shoot out the streetlight at the intersection of Sixteenth Street and South Hamlin. Their first shots missed the target; then at last one struck, plunging the corner into darkness. A sound of shattering glass came from the grocery store on Sixteenth Street. The pistol fire had been so close, just below the window, it changed air pressure inside the building, tightening my inner ear. Roving gangs were setting cars on fire. Light from the interiors of torched cars threw shadows like strokes of tar across the bedroom's furnishings. Below the window figures darted furtively through the darkness, their colors and clans indistinguishable, slaying—or trying to slay—one another. I no longer knew on which side of this slaying I belonged. Or if there was any victory, pleasure, or Promised Land that could justify the killing and destruction of the past three nights.
I looked at the watch on my wrist. The luminous numerals read 8:15, but it felt more like midnight in the soul.
"Who is it?" The minister rubbed his eyes. "Is he here for the Agenda Committee meeting? Tell him I'll be ready in just a minute—"
"No, sir. He's outside in the hallway now. Reverend, I think you need to take a look at this."
After swinging his feet to the floor, he sat hunched forward, both elbows on his knees, waiting for his head to clear. I noticed he wore no cross around his neck. Nor did he need one. With his shirt open, there in the bedroom's heat, I could see the scar tissue shaped like a rood—a permanent one—over his heart, carved into his flesh by physician Aubre D. Maynard when he removed Izola Curry's letter opener from his chest in Harlem Hospital. I knew he was tired, and I did not rush him. His staff had been working off-the-clock since the West Side went ballistic. He hadn't slept in two days. Neither had I. All this night I'd drifted in and out of nausea, finding a clear space where I briefly felt fine, then as I heard the gunfire again, sirens, the sickness returned in spasms of dizziness, leaving me weak and overheated, then chilled.
He reached toward his nightstand for the wristwatch he'd left on top of a stack of books—The Writings of Saint Paul, Maritain's Christianity and Democracy, Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ—alongside the sermon he was preparing for the coming Sunday. Typically, his sermons took two-thirds of a day to compose. In them his conclusions were never merely closures but always seemed to be fresh starting points. The best were classically formal, intentionally Pauline, cautious at the beginning like the first hesitant steps up a steep flight of stairs, then each carefully chosen refrain pushed it higher, faster, with mounting intensity, toward a crescendo that fused antique form and African rhythms, Old Testament imagery and America's most cherished democratic ideals—principles dating back to the Magna Carta—into a shimmering creation, a synthesis so beautiful in the way his words alchemized the air in churches and cathedrals it could convert the wolf of Gubbio. He was, I realized again, a philosopher, which was something easy to forget (even for him) in a breathless year that began with the January murder of student Sammy Younge in Alabama, seventeen-year-old Jerome Huey beaten to death in Cicero in May, Fred Hubbard shot in April, Ben Chester White (Mississippi) and Clarence Triggs (Louisiana) killed by the Klan in June and July, the Georgia legislature's refusal to seat Julian Bond in February because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, Kwame Nkrumah deposed as Ghana's leader the same month, then the slaughter of eight Chicago student nurses by a madman named Richard Speck. Not until I saw the books by his bed did I recall that in a less tumultuous time he taught Greek thought to a class of Morehouse students, among them Julian Bond, who testified that King, a freshly minted Ph.D., often looked up from his notes, closed his copy of Plato's collected dialogues, and brought whole cloth out of his head passages from Socrates' apology, emphasizing the seventy-one-year-old sage's reply to his executioners, "I would never submit wrongly to any authority through fear of death, but would refuse even at the cost of my life."
After turning his watch-stem a few times, he squinted up at me, searching his mind for my name. I could tell he remembered me only as one of his organization's many, nameless volunteers.
"I know I've seen you, um—"
"Matthew, sir. Matthew Bishop."
"Oh yes, of course," he said.
Although he took great care to put everyone on his staff at ease, I'd always felt awkward and off-balance on the few occasions I'd been in his presence; I'd never seemed able to say the right things or find a way to stand or sit that didn't betray how disbelieving I was that he was talking to someone who had as little consequence in this world (or the next) as I did. As he pulled on his shoes, I guessed straightaway what he was thinking: I was not making sense, nor was I much to look at. I knew I left no lasting impression on people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name. I had no outstanding features, no "best side," as they say, to hold in profile. During SCLC meetings, a demonstration, rally, or march, I blended easily into the background, as bland and undistinguished as a piece of furniture, so anonymous most people forgot I was there. I was no taller than the minister himself, but much thinner: a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself. I kept my hair neatly trimmed, wore respectable shoes, and always had a book or magazine nearby to flip open when I found myself alone, which, as it turned out, was most of the time, even when I was in a crowd. I was nobody. A man reminded of his mediocrity—and perishability—nearly every moment of the day. A nothing. Merely a face in the undifferentiated mass of Movement people who dutifully did what our leaders asked, feeling sometimes like a cog in a vast machine—I did feel that way often: replaceable like the placards we made for a march, or the flyers we plastered all over the city, only to paper over them with new pages a week later.
Then why did I join? My mother revered Dr. King. And I did too. Compared with the minister and his family, who were Georgia brahmins, the closest thing black America had to a First Family, we were at best among the "little people," like the inconspicuous disciple Andrew, destined to run their errands and man their ditto machines on the margins of history. Nevertheless, my mother (to me) was regal, aristocratic by virtue of her actions: a sister to Mother Pollard who, when stopped by reporters during the Montgomery boycott, said, "My feets is tired but my soul is rested." It was that woman and my mother King had in mind when in his 1955 speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church he said, "When the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning into the veins of civilization.'" That was true of him, of course. History knew nothing of Ellesteen Bishop. Since her death it was as if she'd never lived, and now only existed in memory, in me during those times when I thought of her, which were less and less each year, and when I ceased to be, it seemed to me, all vestiges of her would vanish as well. (Often I tried to reconstruct her face, and found I could not remember, say, her ears. How could I forget my own mother's ears?) In her mind, the minister was a saint. She'd kept his portrait right beside photos of Jesus and John Fitzgerald Kennedy over her bed. More than anything I wanted to help the Movement that had meant so much to her, to do something for him, since I was, as I said, a man of no consequence at all.
"It's good to see young people like yourself helping out," the minister said. "How old did you say you were?"
"Twenty-four."
"Relax, there's no need to be nervous. Tell me, what exactly do you do around here?"
"Whatever needs doing. Sometimes it's filing," I said. "Other times it's taking notes at meetings and getting out flyers. For the last week I've been chauffeuring your wife to speeches on the North Side and sticking around evenings to help Amy watch the apartment. It gives me a chance to catch up on my studies."
"You're in school, then?"
"I was ... until last year. I left when my mother passed."
"I'm sorry," he said, nodding. "And your father—"
"I never knew him."
He glanced away, clearing his throat. "What were you working on? In school, I mean."
"Philosophy."
All at once his eyes brightened, as if I'd called the name of an old friend. "When there's time," he said, "you should let me look over some of your papers. It's been a while since I've had a chance to put everything aside and freely discuss ideas. Who were you reading?"
"I left off with Nietzsche."
From the distaste on his face, the deep frown, one would have thought I'd said I was studying the Devil.
"Have you read Brightman?"
"Not yet."
"Do," he urged. "No one else makes perfect sense to me. Get the Nietzsche out of your system. He's seductive for children—all that lust for power—but he's really the one we're fighting against." He stood up, reaching into his wrinkled suitcoat slung over the back of a bedside chair for a pack of cigarettes. "Think about it."
"I will, sir, except right now we've got something ... pretty strange outside."
"Strange?" He pursed his lips. "You didn't say anything about strange before. Let me have it."
"I think you need to see him for yourself."
Wearily, he pulled on his wrinkled suitcoat, then his shoes. I could see that the short nap had helped not at all. The grumbling of his belly told me he must be hungry, that he hadn't eaten a decent meal in a day and a half, but checking the flat's refrigerator, which never kept anything cold, would have to wait until he faced the unsettling reason I'd disturbed his slumber. Another leader, I knew, might have sent me away, calling attention to his trials, his suffering, his fatigue. For King that was out of character. Too many times he'd said, "It is possible for one to be self-centered in his self-sacrifice"—in other words, to use the pain of performing the Lord's work to seek pity and sympathy. No, he never dwelled upon himself, and, although tired, he buttoned his suitcoat and stepped with jelly-legged exhaustion from the darkened bedroom, forcing his lips into a smile as he followed me down the hallway to the living room.
Waiting in the kiln-hot kitchen, seated in a straight-backed chair, was Amy. I felt her presence before my eyes found the imprint of the simple cross under her white blouse, her denim skirt, and the Afro, an aureole black as crow's feathers, framing her face. She kept pushing a pair of black, owl-frame glasses back up the narrow bridge of her nose—a student's gesture, I'd thought during the first few weeks when she volunteered for the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. Her voice was low and smoky. Some nights it ran rill-like through my head. She was a Baptist, raised since the age of six by her grandmother on Chicago's South Side after the death of her mother following a beating—one of many—from her father, who worked for the railroad and gambled away his meager earnings at the race track. Thus it was her grandmother—Mama Pearl, as she called her—who'd taken care of Amy. Earlier that summer she'd invited Mama Pearl to drop by the Lawndale flat and meet the minister. And so she did, wheezing up the stairs, crepitations like crackling cellophane sounding in her chest with each breath, struggling with her body's adipose freight, hauling a brown weathered handbag big enough for a child to crawl into, and announced, "Usually I don't go nowhere on the third. That's when my husband comes." For a second she watched King mischievously, then said, "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"
He shook his head.
"I calls my disability check my husband, it comes on the third," and she cackled wildly. The staff fell in love with her that day, with her feathery wig that knocked twenty years off her total of seventy-eight, with the way she worked her toothless mouth like a fish while listening to King explain his plans in Chicago, bobbing her head and asking, "Is you, really?" with her head pushed forward, wig askew, and feet planted apart in two shapeless black shoes. She was utterly unselfconscious. Egoless, and flitted round the flat as though she had feet spun from air. Descending like twin trees from her checkered dress were two vein-cabled legs, lumpy in places, bowed, but it was her voice that everyone remembered most. Thinking she might be thirsty, I offered her a soda, which she declined, shaking her head and explaining, "Thank you, dah'ling, I'm tickled, but I bet' not drink no pop, I might pee on myself." Her bag was filled with medicine for her heart and high blood pressure, ills of which she was heedless, saying, "Naw, I ain't supposed to eat salt, but I eats it anyway. I eats anything."
In point of fact, Mama Pearl was everybody's grandmother. "There wasn't nothin' I didn't do in the fields," she said, speaking of her childhood in southern Illinois. Now she lived on Stony Island in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month walkup with no running water, where she passed her time crocheting (she gave the minister a quilt she'd worked on for two years), "eye-shopping" (as she put it) in downtown stores, and fishing, which was her passion. She'd go with what she called another "senior" or Amy, having her granddaughter lug along a bulging bag of fried chicken, cookies, grapes and peaches, a few ribs, and a thermos. For Mama Pearl fishing was a social event, one to be shared as you ate and talked and played whist. Standing ankle-deep in the water, she'd throw out her line, but was almost too afraid of saltwater worms to slice and bait them (they were hairy and huge and had serrated teeth like a saw). During her afternoon at the flat, she brought forth from her enormous bag three canisters of her own home-cooked raspberry, apricot, and cinnamon rugelach, which she distributed to the entire staff. She inspected everything, involved herself with everyone, including me ("Now, you don't mind my bein' nosy, do you, Matthew? I was jes ovah there talkin' to that light-skinned fellah and he didn't mind"), and giggled like a young girl, "Ain't I somethin'?" Before leaving she collected SCLC stationery as souvenirs for the other "seniors" in her church and, waving good-bye at the door, assured us all that "I had a re-e-e-al fine time."
So had we all, especially King, who kissed her hand as she left (again she giggled), and Amy, who seemed aglow whenever she looked at the grandmother who'd taught her Scripture and how to be a woman, how to crochet, that she could use a string and old tin can for fishing just as easily as a pole and line, and that at all times she must remember others. Yes, she'd taken care of Amy well, raising her—or so I thought—to be as pure in love and self-forgetfulness and service as herself, though Amy at twenty, with her brilliant Dorothy Dandridge smile, was drop-dead beautiful. She did not eat meat. Synthetic fabrics, she said, gave her a rash. She had briefly studied drama and modern dance at Columbia College, where I'd first seen her in the hallways, but then she ran short on funds and took whatever temporary job turned up—short-order cook, dayworker, then watching the Lawndale flat after I'd recommended her for the job.
I had my reasons for that.
Compared with her, I was shy and unsure of myself in everything except my studies. Most of the time feelings banged and knocked through me like something trying to break free from inside. But I screwed up my courage and asked her out to dinner a week after she came to work. Amy thought about my request for a moment, her head cocked to one side, and simply replied, "I don't eat." I never had the courage to ask her again.
To avoid her eyes, I turned to the minister, who said, "Well, where is he?"
"I told him to wait outside on the steps," Amy said, pulling her skirt down a little. "I'll get him. You two go on back to the kitchen. Matthew, show him the I.D."
The minister asked, "What I.D.?"
From my shirt pocket I extracted a dog-eared card. "She means this."
The card I handed over as we walked back down the hallway was an expired Illinois state driver's license issued to one Chaym Smith, birth date 01/15/29, height 5'7", weight 180, eyes brown. The minister gazed—and gazed—at the worn license, picking at his lip, and finally looked back at me, poking the card with his finger.
"This could be me!"
"That's what we thought too," I said.
"Who is this man?"
"We don't know."
"But what does he want with me?"
"Sir," I said, "maybe he should tell you himself."
I could see the minister was impatient now for some explanation. Minutes passed. In the kitchen, the wall clock ticked softly beside an Ebony magazine calendar. Food smells, sour and sharp, floated from the sink and an unemptied, paper-lined garbage pail beside it. Then from the front room we could hear the door open. Outside, sirens pierced the hot night air. The neighborhood dogs howled. Through the window, I saw flames from burning cars dancing against a dark sky skirling with tear gas and smoke. The night felt wrong. All of it, as if the riot, the looting and lunacy, breakdown and disorder, had torn space and time, destroying some delicate balance or barrier between dimensions—possible worlds—creating a portal for fantastic creatures to pour through. I could not shake that feeling, and it grew all the stronger when Amy entered the kitchen with the man whose driver's license I'd handed to King. A man without father or mother, like the priest Melchizedek who mysteriously appeared in the Valley of Siddim after the king of Sodom rebelled against Chedorlaomer.
Stepping back a foot, King whispered, "Sweet Jesus ..."
"I thought you'd be interested," I said.
Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father's commodious, two-story Queen Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with the black poor. Certainly in every darkened, musty pool hall, on every street corner, in every cramped prison cell he'd passed through, the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith—but never quite like this.
He tore his eyes away, then looked back. Smith was still there, his eyes squinted, the faint smile on his lips one part self-protective irony two parts sarcasm, as if he carried unsayable secrets (or sins) that, if spoken, would send others running from the room. His workshirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees—he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world's cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very embodiment of the blues. Then, as the minister knuckled his eyes, Smith, behind his heavy black eyeglasses, beneath his bushy, matted hair and scraggly beard—as rubicund in tint as Malcolm Little's—began to look less threatening and more like a poor man down on his luck for a long, long time, one who'd probably not eaten in a week. Neglected like the very building we were in. Everything about him was in disrepair. Just as the city's administration and the flat's landlord, a white man named John Bender (who was hardly better off than his tenants), had failed to invest in the crumbling eyesore and allowed it to degenerate into a dilapidated, dangerous public health hazard, so no one, it seemed, had invested in Chaym Smith.
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 fucked 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.
King lit a fresh cigarette off the one he had going. "Was that what you wanted?"
Smith shrugged. "I guess so. I wanted them boys to have a father. I figured Juanita'n me could come together on that."
"I think you did an honorable thing."
"Naw." Again, that satiric grin. "I was a fool."
He'd tried, said Smith, to provide for the boys and their mother, but maybe—who knows?—he didn't try hard enough or just wasn't meant to be married, or maybe he had an inverted Midas touch so that everything he brushed against transmogrified into crap. He gave up going to school, he got a second job with a moving company, and after two years he was able to get them into a bigger place, a housing project, in Altgeld Gardens, though it seemed like even with two jobs there was hardly anything left at the end of the month after he paid the bills, and somehow—he wasn't sure how—what little was left he wound up putting on another bottle of whiskey because he needed that to wind down and get to sleep some nights; and there wasn't much time either to go to church after he took a third job as a night watchman on the weekends, or to spend with the boys, who started cutting school and keeping bad company, or with Juanita, who, he discovered, liked Colombian Gold as much as he did Johnny Walker (Black), so much so—according to one of his neighbors—that she slipped away in the afternoons when he was working to see another man who sold exactly what she wanted, though his neighbor said he had no idea how Juanita was paying for it, and when he confronted her with this the fights began, him accusing her of infidelity, her damning him for his drinking, their shouting going on sometimes all night, so loud other residents threatened to call the police, and her boys couldn't bear that, naturally; they took to staying away from the place as long as they could, and after a time so did he, feeling thankful he was so mired in nickel-dime jobs that he had a way to escape that household, escape thinking about himself, escape the near hysteria he felt when he realized his life was a nightmare, a ghastly joke on everything he'd once dreamed of becoming. He rode the streets for hours some evenings after work, simply to avoid returning home, and it was on one such night in 1963, after cruising the South Side until he was nearly out of gas, that he realized he didn't have the faintest idea where the hell he lived. Try as he might, he could not remember the address or recognize the street. Other things were gone too, whole quadrants of his memory. Unable to get home, he pulled up in front of a police station and told them his predicament, and they held him overnight for evaluation.
They held him for a long time, first at the station, then at an institution in Elgin, because when the police knocked on his door, discovered it open, then stepped inside, they found Juanita's three boys strangled in their beds and pieces of their mother distributed here and there throughout the apartment. When they told him, Smith wept in his cell. He swore he knew nothing about it. Twice he passed a polygraph test. They could not convict him of the crime, but they did send him to Elgin, where he worked sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes with other patients cleaning up the grounds around the hospital, and met with doctors who spent two years helping him patch together the broken pieces of his personality. When he was released, there was nowhere for him to go except to Vera Thomas, who gave him back his old room and accepted the little he could offer her from what he made doing odd jobs, here and there, on the South Side.
After a silence, Smith and King drew breath at the same instant. The minister let Smith speak first.
"Like I said, Reverend, I been tryin' like hell to get back on my feet, to do somethin' worthwhile with my life."
"If we can achieve our goals for equality here, I think things will be better for you."
"What if you don't?"
"Excuse me?" The minister scratched his cheek.
"I guess you think the Lord puts us all here with a definite purpose, don't you?"
"That's right. Everyone is equal in His eyes."
"I don't see that."
King was silent, perhaps uncertain of what to say, or so challenged by the sharpness of Smith's voice that his own thoughts were stilled.
"Sir, I need work. That's all I'm asking for. Right now I can't rub two dimes together. Problem is, there ain't too many places that'll hire me. But I figure there is maybe one thing I can do, if you're willin', and I been praying night and day you will be."
"What is that?"
"I read that when you was in Montgomery you got over forty death threats a day—is that so?"
"Yes," the minister said, nodding, "and I still get them."
"That woman who stabbed you? Weren't you signing books when that happened? The knife come within an inch of your heart, didn't it?"
"Yes."
"I coulda been there instead of you," said Smith.
"What?"
"When you go somewhere or leave a place, I could be there too, and if somebody's tryin' to hurt you, they won't know whichaway to turn. That's all I'm askin', that you let me do somethin'—maybe the only thing in this world—I can do."
"No." The minister stood up so suddenly the back of his legs sent his chair skidding a foot behind him. "Absolutely not. I could never agree to anything like that."
Smith smiled bitterly. "Thought you might say that. You ain't the first person to turn me away. Or to take a shot at me 'cause I favor you so much."
"What did you say?"
"I said I been catching hell since you come to Chicago. Last week a couple of boys pushed me off the El platform." Smith measured five inches between his forefinger and thumb. "I was 'bout that far from landin' on the third rail. Lots of people know where you're stayin' in town, but some don't. They see me and come to my place. Some of 'em tore up my room. Scared my landlady so much she's askin' me to leave. But where am I gonna go? Hell, I can't walk down the street or go to the store without somebody stoppin' me. Some of 'em spit in my face. That's colored as well as white. That's why I come here. I figure if I'm catchin' hell 'cause of you, I might's well catch it for you instead."
"You've no place to stay?"
"Not after tomorrow."
The minister made a sharp intake of breath. He rubbed the back of his neck, then paced back and forth in the kitchen, perhaps thinking—as I had been all evening—of that ancient Christian story of the couple who found a bedraggled old man at their door, invited him inside, fed and comforted him, and only after their guest left discovered he was the Nazarene. Finally King took his seat. "Would you all come here with me at the table? Mr. Smith has suffered much. I'd like to say a prayer for him."
Amy and I sat down; she was to my left, the minister to my right, and Smith directly in front of me. We joined hands and closed our eyes. Looking back, I cannot recall the whole content of King's prayer, but it was appropriate, an affirmation that all, regardless of circumstance, were loved by the Lord. And I would not have opened my eyes before he'd finished, but I felt pressure beneath the table on my left foot, a gentle tapping like a lover's signal. Thinking this was Amy, hoping it was so, I let my lids blink open, and saw that Smith had never closed his eyes. He was staring at us—like a fugitive peering at a comfortable bourgeois family through their window as they eat dinner, oblivious to his presence—and on his face was that unsettling smile as he critically scrutinized King, then Amy, who gripped his hand tightly (heaven knows what she was thinking). And then, tilting his head, tapping my foot again, he winked.
I felt my face stretch. I squeezed shut my eyes, but his afterimage burned in the space behind my lids long after the prayer was done.
King turned to Smith and said, "Could you step outside?"
After Smith left, the minister rubbed his forehead. "I swear to God, I don't know how to help this man, but I feel we should do something for him. What he proposes ... it's just too dangerous!"
"Sir," I said, "it sounds like he's already a target. You might say his resemblance to you has marked him."
"Yes, yes." He kneaded his lower lip. "Amy, when your grandmother was here, did Mama Pearl say she grew up downstate?"
"Yes," said Amy. "Her old house is there. It's empty. No one is living there now."
"Could he stay there?"
"I guess so."
"I'd like you and Matthew to stay with him, at least until the disturbance is over and we're finished here in Chicago. I want you to work with him. Get him back on his feet. Help him understand what the Movement's about—and have him sign the Commitment Blank."
"What about you?" Amy asked. "Won't you need us here?"
"I think we'll be all right. We'll find somebody to replace you." He stepped toward the kitchen door. Turning, he added, "I'll see that you're both compensated for this, of course," and then he started toward the bedroom and stopped. "One other thing."
"Yes, sir?"
"You keep that man away from my wife, you hear?"
I assured him we would not let Smith, who was still waiting outside, anywhere near his family. I walked down the hallway, opened the front door, and found our visitor sitting on the top step, smoking. Keeping a few feet between us, I said, "Chaym, it's okay. Doc's going to find something for you to do." Cautiously, I smiled. "He thinks you might be able to help."
"Yeah, and maybe I can do something special for you too. You interest me, Bishop. You've got promise."
"For what?"
The only answer Smith gave was his mocking, mordant grin.
I swallowed with difficulty. When I spoke, my voice splintered, and he seemed to enjoy that. "I'll call you tomorrow with more details. Is that all right? I really do hope he gives you a job."
"A job?" Now Smith was descending the first few steps into the shadows, his profile lighted in such a way that I could see only fragments of his face, like pieces of an unfinished puzzle, or a mask. "I don't want just a job, Bishop. Uh-uh. I want a li'l of what the good doctor in there has got in such great abundance."
"What is that?"
Now I could see his face not at all, though I heard his shoes striking the lower stair treads, and from below, on the lightless levels where he stood, like a voice rising up beneath the ground, I thought I heard him say, Immortality.
Jacket Notes:
Stepping back a foot, King whispered, 'Sweet Jesus ...'
'I thought you'd be interested,' I said.
Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down ... the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith — but never quite like this.
Set against the racial turbulence of the Civil Rights era, Dreamer is the first work of fiction to explore the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. — political visionary, human rights activist, preacher, scholar and martyr. The story, told in the main by one of King's devoted followers, Matthew Bishop, is also a tale of doubles, warring brothers, envy and inequality.
Johnson's brilliantly realised historical novel deftly handles its material, weaving a subtle and beautiful novel of considerable power and importance, Dreamer is a multi-layered masterpiece that is already being heralded in the States as a major work of the late twentieth century and it affirms Johnson's position as one of the most significant novelists writing today.
Charles Johnson won the National Book Award in 1990 for his novel Middle Passage. A widely published literary critic, philosopher, cartoonist, screen-writer, essayist and lecturer, he is one of twelve African-American authors honoured in an international series of stamps celebrating great writers of the twentieth century. He is currently the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.
'No other novelist among us today has quite Charles Johnson's philosophical weight, intellectual force, or spiritual understanding. Dreamer is an inspired and glorious achievement, infused with its author's expansive wisdom, his vibrant historical and moral imagination, and most of all, his heart. This is a book to sustain us — black and white, all of us — and so powerfully wrought as to endure in our literature so long as our literature itself endures.'
David Guterson
'I am humbled by Dreamer and grateful for it. It is a transcendent, brilliant book.'
David Guterson Author of Snow Falling on Cedars
'A beautiful and heartfelt novel of substance; intriguing and cleverly rendered.'
Oscar Hijuelos Pulitzer prizewinning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
What People are Saying About This
Compelling and profound, Dreamer is a book fully equal to its monumental subject, Martin Luther King Jr. Charles Johnson is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.
With this new book Charles Johnson confirms his position at the summit of American letters. Dreamer is an inspired and glorious achievement, infused with its autor's expansive wisdom, his vibrant historical and moral imagination, and most of all, his heart. It is a transcendent, brilliant book.
Charles Johnson's Dreamer is a beautiful and heartfelt novel of substance; intriguing and cleverly rendered, it has a plot that entertains even as it throws a light on the life of Martin Luther King during the epoch of America's struggles with civil rights.
Magnificent, and like everything Charles Johnson does, deep and funny. As a writer, he goes places few of us dare to go. He's one of the most gifted writers I've read and is an inspiration to all writers.
Reading Group Guide
READING GROUP GUIDE
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. Who is the real "dreamer" in this novel? Is it Dr. King, dreaming of a world filled with equality and racial harmony? Is it Matthew Bishop, dreaming of the day he will truly become his own man, an individual who shines in his own glory rather than hides in the shadow of others? Or is it Chaym Smith, dreaming of the day he will achieve greatness like Dr. King, yet remain true to his own beliefs?
2. A major turning point for Matthew is the moment he gives in to his anger at the diner, lashing out at the waitress for her racist behavior. He is exhilarated by his response, even though it goes against everything Dr. King stands for. Discuss other events in Matthew's life that reflect Chaym's influence. Is it wrong for Matthew to behave in this manner, or is it a necessary step he must take to come to terms with his own anger and disillusionment?
3. Discuss ways in which Chaym and Matthew mirror each other. Both are smart and insightful, but while one always tries to take "the high road," the other is empowered by his refusal to accept the terms of others. Who ultimately emerges as the winner?
4. Many literary texts use the "doppelgänger" as a means to explore issues of good versus evil and nature versus nurture. How effectively does Johnson use this device to examine these and other issues? Compare his treatment to other books, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
5. Do you agree with Chaym's assertion that "all narratives are lies"? What does he mean when he says this? That we (individually or as a group) revise history to fit our needs, conveniently "forgetting" events that do not suit out agenda? Does the ability to revise the past make it easier to live with?
6. When Chaym is slated to make his first public appearance as Dr. King, Matthew closely watches the pulpit, unsure if the man at the podium is Chaym or Dr. King. Who did you think was making the speech as you read the novel? Is Chaym capable of giving such a speech? Discuss ways in which Chaym's fate might have changed had he, as planned, stood in for Dr. King that fateful day?
7. As Chaym dejectedly watches Dr. King accept congratulations for his rousing speech at the A.M.E. church, Matthew describes him as "undergoing a living death in the great man's presence." Doesn't this statement actually describe what Matthew himself goes through every day?
8. Chaym's emotional growth is charted by his drawings. His earlier artwork, completed before he joined the Movement, seems to focus on his own personal misery. Later, he looks outward and depicts the beauty he finds in his surroundings. What other events signal Chaym's growth?
9. Part of Matthew's job is to keep a detailed record of the Movement. Is Matthew an accurate keeper of the flame? Does his role as history's scribe make him more powerful than Smith, maybe even more powerful than Dr. King?
10. Matthew describes himself as "the insecure, callow prop in the background of someone else's story." Do you agree with his assessment? Is Matthew an observer or a participant in the making of history? Is he underestimating his importance to the Civil Rights Movement because he believes that his contributions are dwarfed by those of "great men" like Dr. King?
11. In the end, does Dr. King experience a change of heart when he questions the validity of his peaceful methods? Is this Chaym's influence shining through? Is King giving up or giving in to pressure?
12. What do you think about Chaym's ultimate decision to leave? Is he saving himself, or is he making a sacrifice for the good of Dr. King and the Movement? Was his leaving really the only possible outcome to his situation? What do you think ultimately became of Chaym?
13. What resemblances are there in the story of King and Chaym to the biblical tale of Cain and Abel? Consider the following:
There is a moment when each man discovers God. For King, it is a transforming experience that shows him the way to confront the world's evil, while Chaym's faith is short-lived, and he becomes disillusioned by the evils of the world. How does each man's relationship to God affect what happens to him?
What are Chaym's motivations in helping King? Is his offer to be a decoy a true gesture of self-sacrifice? Or does he covet King's position as a great and beloved leader?
Chaym eventually succumbs to the FBI's threats and cooperates with them out of fear, but we never learn exactly what happens to him. Do you think he betrays King? Might he be responsible for his death in some way?
Chaym is able to imitate King in all aspects except his faith in God. Does Chaym represent what King might have been without God?
14. Many famous figures who came to symbolize peace during their lives (King, Ghandi, Rabin, and even John Lennon) have been struck down by assassins' bullets. Discuss the irony of such voices of reason being silenced by the violence they loathed. Do you think Dr. King would be America's martyred symbol for Civil Rights had he not been murdered in his prime? Does his murder allow us to conduct our own kind of historical revision by letting us forget his limits as a man and leader, and focus solely on his tremendous achievements?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Johnson was the first black American male since Ralph Ellison to win the National Book Award for fiction, which he received for Middle Passage. His fiction has been much anthologized, and he was named in a survey conducted by the University of Southern California as one of the ten best short-story writers in America. A widely published literary critic, philosopher, cartoonist, essayist, screenwriter, and lecturer, he is one of twelve African American authors honored in an international stamp series celebrating great writers of the twentieth century. Johnson's alma mater, Southern Illinois University, administers the Charles Johnson Award for Fiction and Poetry, a nationwide competition inaugurated in 1994 for college students. He was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He is currently the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle with his wife, Joan, and their two children.
Interviews
On April 22nd, the barnesandnoble.com Live Events Auditorium welcomed Charles Johnson, who joined us to discuss DREAMER, his first novel since his National Book Award-winning MIDDLE PASSAGE.
Moderator: Welcome to barnesandnoble.com, Charles Johnson. We are pleased you can join us this evening to discuss DREAMER!
Charles Johnson: Thank you. It's a privilege to be here.
Marion Edwards from Chicago, IL: Much has been made of late about nonfiction books that blur the edges of fact. DREAMER is the reverse of that -- a novel in which reality is constantly present. Yet I wouldn't call DREAMER a historical novel. Why did you decide to write DREAMER in the form of a novel rather than a biography?
Charles Johnson: We can read history books and learn facts. But the advantage that a novelist has is that he or she can plunge us emotionally into a moment of history by using the historical record as the basis for the story and allowing his imagination and emotions to fill in the gaps.
Arthur from Newtown, PA: How much research did you need to do for DREAMER? What were your main sources for certain details and mannerisms of MLK -- newsreels, speeches, journals, interviews?
Charles Johnson: I spent two years reading biographies and histories of Dr. King before I started writing in 1993. I looked at documentary film footage over and over again about the Chicago Freedom Movement. I read magnificent works of history by Stephen Oates, David L. Lewis, Lerone Bennett; I read Coretta King's book on her life with Martin Luther King. And both volumes of the papers of Martin Luther King, which contain every scrap of paper that he wrote from his teenage years through his education at Boston University. I also studied his sermons, his speeches, and sources about the civil rights movement.
Jerzy from Michigan: Do you personally believe any of the conspiracy theories surrounding Martin Luther King Jr.'s death? Does your novel make any allusions to these theories? What do you think about King's son's appeal for James Earl Ray's freedom?
Charles Johnson: I don't ascribe to any particularly conspiracy theory, but in the very last chapter of DREAMER I record as thoroughly as I possibly can the inconsistencies and ambiguities surrounding the circumstances of his assassination. I personally think that many important questions have been left unanswered. And I believe the King family is justified in wanting to see any unclear aspects of Dr. King's murder cleared up.
Jain from Long Island: Were MLK's family members consulted for this book? Have they read DREAMER? Do you know what their response to DREAMER is?
Charles Johnson: My agent was contacted by the agent who represents the King family a few years ago to see if I would write a book about where the members of the King family are today. It was to be a quickie book, which I had to respectfully decline doing because I was working on DREAMER. But I did not consult any members of the King family as I wrote DREAMER. I don't know if any of them have read it yet. But if they do, I hope they will see it as a respectful homage to Dr. King.
Soraya from New Haven, CT: Mr. Johnson, I loved DREAMER. What was especially striking was the package and cover. Throughout reading the book, an eye from Reverend King's face watched me, making me feel as if I was constantly being observed. It often gave me pause as I read. Was this overlap of MLK's portrait from the front jacket intentional?
Charles Johnson: That's interesting. Just tonight a lady in a bookstore in Madison, Connecticut, pointed out to me that as she read the book, she felt King was watching her because the eye flaps over on the cover. I hadn't noticed that myself until tonight. I don't know if it was intentional on the part of the book's designer, but I agree with you that it must intensify the reading experience.
Matt from Trenton, NJ: Throughout DREAMER, you hint at King's demise. Do you think King himself knew he wasn't long for this world, that his life wasn't his own anymore?
Charles Johnson: I think Dr. King did know that his days were numbered. Toward the end of his life, he gave his wife a bouquet of plastic flowers and told her he wanted her to have something she could keep. He lived with a $30,000 bounty on his head and received as many as 40 death threats some days. I imagine he knew that his life would be short-lived because he told his wife after JFK was shot, "That's what's going to happen to me."
Aloysius from New York City: Have you ever met the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.?
Charles Johnson: Unfortunately, I did not have that privilege.
Steven from Home: Good evening, Charles Johnson. The information on this site about your book mentions that this is the first fictional account of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. Why do you think that is, and do you think that you have opened the door for more novelists to explore the life of this fascinating man? Have you ever thought about writing a novel about what would have happened if Dr. King had lived?
Charles Johnson: I came of age during the Black Power Movement, as did most middle-aged black writers today. In the late '60s and early '70s our attention was focused more on the legacy of Malcolm X than on the legacy of Dr. King. However, I should point out that we have no fictional portraits in novels or short stories about Malcolm X either. I wrote about Dr. King because I felt I had not fully appreciated or understood him deeply enough during his lifetime, and I wanted to explore his legacy 30 years after his death. I don't think I'll write another novel about Dr, King, but I do anticipate continuing to study his life and legacy and letting that legacy influence my short fiction and essays.
Ria from Bradenton, FL: I sometimes got so frustrated reading DREAMER with Matthew Bishop because I felt he was so powerless and passive as a narrator. Did you base his character on someone? Why did you use him as a narrator?
Charles Johnson: I chose Matthew to narrate DREAMER because he respects Dr. King so highly yet feels at times incapable of achieving the idealistic goals that King set before us. Matthew is struggling with a crisis of faith in his own life, and so Dr. King is inspirational to him and serves as a teacher; the double Chaym Smith also serves as his teacher, but in a slightly different way. As Matthew narrates the story, he undergoes his own spiritual odyssey. He is a kind of everyman, and in many ways at the end of the novel the legacy of Dr. King falls upon his shoulders and those of the woman he loves, Amy Griffith, as they move into the future beyond the day of King's assassination.
Dave from St. Louis, MO: Will there be a film version of DREAMER?
Charles Johnson: It's a little early to say, since the novel was just published on April 4th. I think it might be a little difficult to turn this book into a movie, but I'm willing to entertain any offers.
Samer from Mooresville, NC: There's a line that Matthew thinks to himself when he's out with Amy that has stuck in my mind: that African American women blame every black man for the burdens and suffering other black men have caused them. Do you think that's a true statement about African American relationships -- that they are almost hopeless from the beginning, like Amy and Matthew?
Charles Johnson: I think many young black men and women find themselves in the awkward position of Matthew and Amy, trying to overcome centuries of discrimination and oppression that effect even the personal lives of black people. What I like about Matthew and Amy's relationship is that they find a way to connect despite all those obstacles placed in their way.
Mark from New York City: Having a distrust for historical fiction for as long as I can remember, but as a literature lover always welcome to attempts at swaying my opinion, I wonder if you can shed some light on the merits of the genre? How do you outrun accusations of revisionism?
Charles Johnson: I've never seen myself as a writer of historical fiction. Instead I've always seen myself as a writer of philosophical fiction. However, the last three stories that I wanted to tell in my previous three novels all demanded that I situate them in the past. This was not something I chose to do, it was something demanded by the story itself. One virtue of setting a story in the past is that we have both emotional and aesthetic distance from those events and perhaps can see them with greater clarity. In regard to the problem of revisionism, I think that all history and historical fiction involve the art of interpretation. And what is delightful about history is that we can have numerous interpretations of a single event, each one of which enriches and deepens our understanding. So I don't think that there's a single truth to a historical event, but rather multiple truths that historians and novelists deliver to us.
Darias from Knoxville, TN: In your mind, do you know where Chaym Smith disappeared to? Has he arrived in a place in your imagination?
Charles Johnson: I left the fate of Chaym open. Matthew and Amy don't know any more about what happened to him than we know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. One of my students suggested to me that Chaym probably killed the two FBI agents and escaped. I find that idea intriguing.
Erica Beacon from Arlington, VA: The character of Chaym raises some very interesting questions. In your mind, what experiences separated Chaym from Dr. King? How did one become so respected and the other so ignored?
Charles Johnson: I think the difference between Chaym and Dr. King parallels in interesting ways the difference between Cain and Abel. Chaym is extremely talented and brilliant, perhaps even a genius, but what he lacks that Dr. King has is a profound spiritual faith and a tremendous capacity for self-sacrifice for others. I believe that is the fundamental difference between the fictional Dr. King character and Chaym Smith.
Karen Bahner from Eugene, OR: In all the biographical research you did on Dr. King, was there one fact about him that surprised you the most?
Charles Johnson: yes. I was surprised to learn that of all the philosophers he studied, the one who gave him the deepest trouble was Friedrich Nietzsche. Although when I think about it now, it seems perfectly logical that the author of THE WILL TO POWER and THE ANTICHRIST would trouble a Baptist minister's son.
Corrine from Dayton, MO: Speaking of Cain and Abel, would I get in trouble if I said that MLK and Malcolm X sort of personified that story? Do you deal with Malcolm X in DREAMER? Does the Nation of Islam play a role?
Charles Johnson: The Nation of Islam is referred to as well as Malcolm X in DREAMER, but Dr. King and specifically Chaym Smith are the principal actors on the stage of this drama.
Fern from Darien, CT: Greetings, Charles Johnson. I haven't read DREAMER yet but plan on ordering it. I would like to know what your writing schedule is like. How much time do you spend researching your novels? How much time writing? Do you write every day?
Charles Johnson: I spend roughly five to six years writing and researching a novel. I don't write every day. I tend to be a binge writer. I might write for three months straight, night and day, and them back off for a month to do more research. I tend to write at night, when it's quiet.
Shamus from Arizona: What's your opinion of President Clinton's attempts to start a dialogue on race?
Charles Johnson: I think his attempts are well intended. However, from what I've been reading about the dialogue on race, it seems like it's having a hard time getting off the ground.
Pamela from Rochester, NY: What influence did John Champlain Gardner have on your own writing?
Charles Johnson: John Gardner was my mentor and I think he was the greatest writing teacher that ever lived. Gardner looked over my shoulder while I was writing my first published novel, FAITH AND THE GOOD THING. And introduced me to the book world. He had an enormous influence on me as well as thousands of other young writers in the 1970s.
Perry Seminole from Albuquerque, NM: Do you still draw? Are you still painting? Where can we see your work?
Charles Johnson: Yes! I am determined to continue as a cartoonist. You can find new cartoons by me in Literal Latte and also in Quarterly Black Review of Books, in each of their issues.
Jenny Brady from Austin, TX: Who are your literary influences? Do you find any inspiration from any current writers?
Charles Johnson: My strongest literary influences are Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, the American Transcendentalists, John Gardner, and somewhere in there I have to include Herman Hesse. I enjoy the work of numerous contemporary writers from James Alan McPherson to Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Sandra Cisneros, and more writers than I can list here.
Dorothy from Bellingham, WA: Hello, Charles Johnson. I loved MIDDLE PASSAGE and can't wait to read DREAMER. I just wondered if you feel you are still categorized as an African American writer, even after you won the National Book Award? Thank you for taking my question.
Charles Johnson: Thank you for your question. I will always be categorized as an African American writer, but what I hope is that readers can appreciate that black writing is American writing. I firmly am against pigeonholing authors, but it's true that every author brings a background to his or her writing that is indebted to their race, class, or gender. What great writers do, like Saul Bellow and Isaac Singer and Ralph Ellison, is to take the particulars of their background and show us the universal human condition that resides there.
Mary from Michigan: What was the first book you ever wrote?
Charles Johnson: I wrote six novels in two years -- I call them apprentice novels -- before I published my first novel, FAITH AND THE GOOD THING, in 1974.
Carley from Boston, MA: Hello. There's a lot of spiritual references outside of the Bible -- dharma is brought up a lot, as is koans and denzo. Why?
Charles Johnson: Hello. And thank you for your question. In DREAMER, Dr. King's spiritual tradition is Western and Christian; Chaym Smith's influences are largely from the East. Both of those traditions have an impact on the narrator, Matthew Bishop. In other words, he learns from both traditions and creates his own synthesis by the end of the novel.
Ben O. from Brooklyn, NY: In your opinion, how should President Clinton's words spoken in Africa about the slave trade and its evil be interpreted? Is this a good step for healing racial rifts in America?
Charles Johnson: I think that President's Clinton's apology for slavery was a good idea. I think it is, however, more important that he follow through on his goal of seeing an African Renaissance, as he put it. One in which American businesses find ways to enter into cooperative economic ventures with African economies. If this could be done, then the apology for slavery, an institution that economically developed the West at the expense of Africa, will have greater meaning.
Justine from Tulsa, OK: Cain and Abel is all over this book. Chaym is even alliteratively close to Cain. Why this biblical reference? Were you like Matthew, realizing the ubiquity of the story of Cain and Abel?
Charles Johnson: Thank you for being so astute. Cain and Abel struck me as being the perfect story from Genesis to use in this novel. The reason is because I've always seen Dr. King as being our better brother. Also, the civil rights movement is all about the relation of brothers (and sisters) across racial lines. It is a powerful, frightening, and revealing story about envy, inequality, and violence. As a subtheme in DREAMER, I think it amplifies our experience of the conflict between the races.
Moderator: Thank you very much for fielding all of our questions this evening, Mr. Johnson. We have it on good authority that tomorrow is your birthday and wish you many happy returns. Do you have any final words for our online audience this evening?
Charles Johnson: I would like to thank all the people who asked questions, and I especially want to thank those who have already read the book.