Free Dreamer by Charles Johnson Page A

grandfather Jim Long had been used by his master to breed slaves; Daddy King often said, “I came from nowhere.” At age fifteen, he could read but not write. Just the same, determination to win the hand of a Spelman seminary student named Alberta Williams, and to rise in Atlanta’s black world, riveted himto study, “until I was falling asleep saying my lessons to myself.”
    But Chaym Smith was clearly not Daddy King. And he, Amy, and I were the most unlikely of teams with a task so impossible that the thought of it kept my Protestant stomach perpetually cramped, knotted, and queasy from the moment King asked us to work together.
    Beside me, Smith—our Melchizedek—dozed. I noticed that the muscles around his mouth and eyes had relaxed, and for the time he was submerged in himself, in that depthless place of dreamless sleep where we spend a third of our lives, he looked serene, almost cherubic, the contours of his cheeks rounded, all the tension in his normally furrowed brow gone, as if a fire somewhere in him had been extinguished. In dreamless sleep, a king was not a king, nor a pauper poor; no one was old or young, male or female, cursed or blessed, educated or ignorant, sinner or saint. (And even in our dreams, there was no apartheid, no segregation between black and white.) This was the face, very Apollonian, I associated most closely with the minister in old photos I’d seen of him when he was a boy who loved to sing “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus” and sat rapt with attention behind the pulpit of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Church and his father stood ramrod straight, preaching with one finger pointed toward heaven. Or in other pictures from 1951 when he happily posed, like a prince who knew a great kingdom awaited him, beside the stately presence of his mother, with just the slightest sprinkling of pimples on his forehead and one lone pustule on his left cheek. Smith awoke, caught me glancing sideways at him, and smirked.
    â€œLike what you see, eh?”
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look so much like him. Yet you’re so different. Chaym, I didn’t know you were a painter—”
    â€œYeah,” he yawned, now looking very Dionysian. “I painted some when I was institutionalized. The doctors thought it’d help me heal. As you can see, I ain’t no famous beauty, nobody’s gonna mistake me for Harry Belafonte, but I was hoping that if I created something beautiful, I could offer that to others. Something that would live after I was gone. A li’l piece of me, you know, that’d endure. Problem was, I was second-rate. Naw, I didn’t say bad. What I did—everything I’ve done—was good. Thing is, being just good don’t get you to heaven. And I’m just too mediocre for hell. God don’t like near misses. Runner-ups and also-rans. Second-best means no banana. Purgatory, I been thinkin’, was designed for people like me … and you.”
    â€œMe?”
    â€œThat’s right. Who’s your daddy?”
    â€œI … don’t know.”
    â€œThat’s what I figured. You like most of the rest of us. Brothers, I mean. You’re illegitimate. No father prepared the way for you. You want to be among the anointed, the blessed—to
belong
. I saw that in you the moment we met. Nothing’s worked for you, I can see that. You ain’t never gonna have fame or fortune. Maybe not even a girl. I’ll bet you ain’t had pussy since pussy had you. When you die, it’ll be like you never lived. That’s why I said I think I can help you.”
    â€œWith
what?
”
    â€œYour salvation,” he said. “You work real hard at being good, Bishop. Anybody can see you’re a Boy Scout. Square as a Necker’s cube. But you don’t fit. You got to remember that nobody on earth likes Negroes. Not even