Dreamer by Charles Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

teal-blue pajamas with gold piping on the placket and around the neck, hoping if he was motionless sleep might come. But his mind churned on. He squinted at the ceiling where he saw, in broken plaster, the face of the strange man who had shaken his certainty that all were equal in the eyes of the Lord. The words still echoed in the deepest coils of his ears. Words Smith had almost hissed, hurling them at him like stones and with such hurt that he, about to open his mouth in a parable, offering one of his standardapothegms for suffering, stopped as if he’d been slapped. All his explanations were suspended, bracketed, and shimmering in their place was the ineluctable presence of this man who could have been his brother were it not for the fact that he appeared to be damned. Or fallen.
    Yes, he could admit it now: their physical likeness frightened him. What were the chances of encountering a double for oneself? Yet there he’d been, as if his own father had spit them out one, two. Like that. And what had he wanted? A job as his decoy? My God, didn’t he have enough trouble already? How strange it always was: someone standing before him, wanting something, and even more incredible than their desire was the belief that he could actually do something for them. (Things had reached a point where he even had to be careful how he complimented others in his letters because some would excerpt his praise, without his permission, in letters of reference.) In the apartment’s close air, in the narrow hallway, in the kitchen, Smith’s scent and vestigial spirit lingered, as if he’d subtly altered the flat—nothing felt the same after his appearance. He’d retreated to the bedroom after the man left.
    But it was not this feeling of displacement that now kept him awake, endlessly readjusting the lumpy pillow beneath his head. It was what Smith had said. The acuity, the clarity with which he’d dismissed “equality” and all that hallowed word implied. There in the predawn shadows, in the unveiling parenthesis into which Smith’s coming placed his most cherished beliefs, he wondered if perhaps it was no more than a word, an abstraction, empty sound signifying nothing. A chimera at the Movement’s core, in fact, the very centerpiece of Jefferson’s magnificent declaration,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Across America, from one platform and podium to the next, he’d sung that sacred principle—equality—as his strongest, last best hope forproclaiming that Americans could not live up to their bedrock ideals if Negroes were disenfranchised. Even his critics tipped lightly around this metaphysical trump card. Still a few tried, albeit timidly (so as not to seem like bigots), the casuists eager to point out that no two things in Nature were equal. Believing so, they said, was simply formulating sincerity (and sentimentality) into dogma. All right, he’d replied. Fine. On the face of things, Nature was unjust. Who could deny that? But in the realm of the spirit invoked by the Founders, in God, there were no defensible social distinctions, for all creatures great and small, black and white, were isomers of the divine Person. It was a shamelessly Platonic argument, he knew that, yet of its veracity he’d been so sure.
    At least until now
.
    He rolled to the side of the bed, the springs in his mattress squeaking; his fingers fumbled on the nightstand, then found his watch and cigarettes. The glowing, beryline numbers read 4:30. In an hour it would be daybreak. He knew that as soon as sunlight knifed through the windows he wouldn’t sleep. After taking off his pajama top, moist and clammy and clinging to his body, he padded barefoot and barechested along the buckled, pewter-gray linoleum to the bathroom, sweat like a sprinkling of silver along his shoulders and chest. When he pulled the light bulb’s chain, a cataract of black