Dreamer
By Charles Johnson
Scribner, 236 pages, $23
On April 4, 1968, an assassin’s rifle shot felled Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It ended not only his inspiring life but also a defining moment in American history. We had dared to dream that with King’s brave leadership, we would purify ourselves of hate and prejudice so that justice and healing would prevail.
Now, in his brilliant but challenging new novel, “Dreamer,” Charles Johnson has attempted a difficult task. He uses historical fiction as a way to meditate on the meaning of King’s life and work, and, more difficult still, to put us inside King’s mind so that we can hear his imagined inner thoughts in the last two years of his life.
Johnson achieves an impressive, credible rendering–a worthy successor to his last novel, “Middle Passage” (1990), a story of the slave trade that won the National Book Award.
“Dreamer” will be difficult for some because of Johnson’s penchant for philosophical thought and jargon, his emphasis on ideas instead of plot and characters. But this should not deter most readers. This is a rewarding book that will provoke careful thought about how we have succeeded and failed in our quest to ensure equality.
“Dreamer” is a modern twist on the biblical story of Cain and Abel. It reminds that in each of us there is one who can be pleasing to God, and another who can be rejected by God and react with jealous, even murderous impulses.
Chaym Smith is a physical double who stands in for King when the civil rights leader is exhausted. But Smith is a drug addict who did not enjoy the enriching childhood and family life King did. This contrast allows Johnson to ruminate on the two sides in a human personality while he also ponders whether there can be true equality.
Most of all, “Dreamer” takes us inside King’s mind and soul during his tormented last months. His non-violent approach is under attack by advocates of Black Power. Meanwhile, this “man from whom the world expected everything” battles exhaustion and doubt as he tries to fulfill his high calling, though he walks every day under the shadow of death:
“He wept for the blood spilled by his enemies, for his own life’s lost options, for the outrageous fragility of what he hoped to achieve in a world smothering in materialism, in the propaganda of sensation, in scientific marvels unmoored from any sense of morality, and he wondered, there in the darkness before the dawn of what might be his last day on earth, if he’d ever been young at all.”
King is, toward the end, always on the verge of being broken apart by his strains and disappointments, yet “he silently said a prayer, knowing that men of conviction had to act, though always on the basis of partial information, blindly forging ahead and hoping for the best. The word for this from time immemorial, he knew, was faith.”
What Johnson says to us through this fictional life of King is that we might often fall short of the mark, but if we are emboldened by love we might find that sometimes, despite our failings, we can do God’s will in service to each other.
