Dreamer by Charles Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

and brown cockroaches in the porcelain sink, on the walls, and in the tiny claw-footed bathtub scrambled away from the light. They fled behind the cabinet and into the cracks where floor and walls joined, some dragging translucent lunular eggs behind them. Instantly he felt ill. Since he’d moved into the flat they were in his food, his clothing, his luggage. One had crawled out of his suitcoat when he was in a meeting, dropping obscenely onto the papers spread before him at the conference table. Filthy things! he thought. A constant companion of the poor. When he was eight, his mother told him that where yousaw one, you could bet there were hundreds more hidden. All at once he was tempted to quash them into pulp with his fingers. But no. He pulled back, willing himself away from violence, remembering the holy men he’d seen one night in Kerala, the twig-broom-carrying Jain priests who killed nothing, ever, and swept in front of themselves as they walked so as not to harm creatures too small to see. They walked in these words:
Whatever it is, it is you.
No, as much as he might want to, he could not harm even these loathsome things without harming himself. The exercise of reining in his revulsion would do him good, he thought, maybe even make him thankful to something he hated for giving him the opportunity to work through his disgust. So he waited, taking long breaths to steady himself, watching them flee and wondering, until the last one disappeared, if Chaym awoke every day to a crawling bathroom like this.
    He ran warm water (it seldom got cold) into his cupped hands, splashed it onto his face, and, looking up, peered at himself in the tiny cabinet mirror above the sink, experimentally touching his cheeks, his chin (he realized he needed to shave), and tracing two fingers across the length of his mustache. My face, he thought. And Chaym’s. But in no other way than the somatic were they equal. In fact, they were like negatives of each other. He laughed, humorlessly. The idea of justice in his life and Chaym’s was a joke. Not only was the distribution of wealth in society grossly uneven, he thought, but so was God-given talent. Beauty. Imagination. Luck. And the blessing of loving parents. They were the products of the arbitrariness of fortune. You could not say they were deserved.
    He stared at his (their) image in the mirror, remembering simultaneously with pride and pain, gratitude and guilty that of everyone in his family he himself had easily the greatest oratorical skills. They outstripped those of his own father, his grandfather, and, to be honest, everyone else he knew. Someresented him for that. Down deep, he could not deny that his dearest friend, Ralph Abernathy, loved and bitterly envied the range and reach of erudition in his sermons. He did not want to recall how many times he’d poured himself, heart and soul, into his preaching only to have another, older minister with a room-temperature I.Q. clap him on the back when he was done, and say, with a smile that never reached his eyes, “Man, I hate you.” Or the jealous ones, no deeper than a dime, who talked about him behind his back as if he had a tail, and cornered him after his roof-raising sermons, and whispered this knife between his ribs, “No wonder them white folks want to integrate with you.” He’d never known exactly how to respond to their envy. He knew—and they knew—that although his gifts were a devastating weapon against racism, they separated him from them. The irony of his situation never escaped him: excellence brought praise—so often from whites—but also the danger of his becoming a pariah among Negroes if he didn’t somehow soften the separateness, the chasm his talent created between himself and others. Most of the time he played by those cutting remarks, or said something self-effacing, or quoted Jesus in Matthew 19:17
(Why callest thou me good? There is none good but …