Dreamer by Charles Johnson

thousand whites on the average earned $1,730 yearly, the fifty thousand Negroes $970. Fewer than two thousand of the voting-age Negroes were registered, and humiliating obstacles were placed in their way. In Montgomery no Negroes held public office. The uneducated were apathetic, resigned to second-class status. The learned, especially if they belonged to any of the black civic groups, were factionalized and fought more often than they agreed.
    For a long time that night he walked the floor, thinking of Revelations 22:15, his head tipped, both hands clenched into fists, his stomach turned to lead, searching for some way to escape his duties on the Montgomery Improvement Association without looking like a coward or a fool. Once his foot struck the leg of a table and brought a lamp and a photo of the baby bouncing onto the carpet. He swore under his breath and undid the mess he’d made. His directionless pacing brought him into the kitchen—he could do less damage there. In order to find something to do with his trembling hands, he put a fresh pot of coffee on the stove, silently watched it brew, then slumped down with his cup at the kitchen table. Coretta was rooms away, caring for the baby. He rubbed his face with both hands. He began to heave for breath, knowing if he failed in this fight against evil, surely the others who’d sacrificed so much would falter as well. His name would be struck from the Book of Life; the boycott would unravel and nothing would have been accomplished. They would be worse off than before. Demoralized, defeated. But in heaven’s name, what man could continue under this weight? He felt caged. Chained. In bondage and no longer belonging to himself. How had Boston University’s rising star come to this cul-de-sac? From childhood and the days his father talked politics at the dinner table, he’d dreamed of uplifting the Race, studied and prepared himself for this great task, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith only to discover, too late, that nobody—or so he feared—gave a goddamn about his bourgeois sacrifices. If Yolanda and Coretta were killed, who would care? If there was no God, as so many thinkers claimed, he was a fool for endangering his family. Love was the ontological foundation of values. God was love. It followed that without Him there could be no basis for all his appeals to justice from the pulpit. No reason for anyone to care about the poor. No argument, in the end, to counter slavery itself, for in a materialistic, mechanistic world, a neutraluniverse onto which man projected his delusions of freedom and inherent worth, no value claims could be made at all—the cosmos would be irrational, not benign, indifferent to order and measure, a nightmare in the mind of some devil who could not roll himself awake. Thus far Montgomery had shown him that if God was not dead, He must certainly be deaf to His people’s suffering.
    His fingers tightened round his empty cup until it shattered, obliterating inside and out. He took a deep breath. In resistance to oppression, he realized, there was fear of reprisals, in acquiescence the annihilation of self-worth, in fame the fear of humiliation, in strength the fear of enemies, in social stature the fear of slander, in health the fear of illness, in beauty the fear of old age, in scholarship the fear of disputants, in living … the certainty of death. His thoughts churned on, complicated, exotic. He felt too tired to move, but his mind, from surface to seabed, kept whirring widdershins.
    At last he began to pray. To whom—or what—he could not say. Not asking for anything then. Not fighting, only confessing, “Lord, I have nothing left …” His gaze drifted to the fragments of the cup that was no longer a cup. But where had the “cup” gone? His fist opened, disappearing into his hand. Where had his “fist” gone? Then it came quietly, unbidden. He was traveling