DREAMER by CHARLES JOHNSON

Author:CHARLES JOHNSON
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

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Calvary AME Church, a pitched-roof, redbrick building with two lancet-arched doorways and a blue and white sign swinging from its southwest edge on the corners of Emerson and Darrow streets in the quiet, progressive suburb of Evanston, was plain and inconspicuous enough for travelers to completely miss—like so much in the black world—if they weren’t looking for it. Its rich, never recorded history was hidden inside, stored within every parishioner, or so Amy said that evening after the Marquette march as we sped down the Outer Drive, crossing bustling Howard Street into a sleepy suburb quite different from south or west Chicago. The riots and agony of marching in the city had largely bypassed the cultural island of Evanston. Most black residents were too busy making a living and caring for their children to take a day off for civil disobedience, though they cared deeply about the Movement’s northern campaign and cheered King, the rebel messiah, the almost paradoxical fusion of Cain and Abel, when the Chicago campaign put into practice his ingenious method of “creative tension” aimed at disrupting the status quo by forcing long-buried hatreds to surface, where they were exposed for the world to see. King’s philosophy notwithstanding, “creative tension” was an act of violence, the murder of a repressive past so that a new order—God’s order—could be born. Yet Evanston, while not the fabled Promised Land, was a curious pocket of tranquillity compared to the Black Belt. There, residents could walk safely at night from one end of town to the other. Liquor was not sold—for that you had to drive to Skokie. There were white millionaires, blue-collar black homeowners bonded by church affiliations, an integrated school system, stores and movie theaters (three), and some years the best public high school in the nation. (However, the school superintendent did demand parental permission on both sides before he would condone interracial dating.)

Because Mama Pearl, once an employee of Fanny’s Restaurant in Evanston, occasionally attended services with friends at Calvary AME, Amy knew something of the town’s older black residents, mostly craftsmen—plumbers and electricians—transplanted from the South during World War II, whole families that migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from the Mississippi Delta, from Tennessee and Arkansas and western Kentucky in the greatest mass movement of humanity in American history. They were, in their own way, initially outcasts. Their church, started in Philadelphia in 1787 after the Great Awakening by Richard Allen, was equidistant from the ivied halls and manicured lawns of Northwestern University and the all-black Center Hospital, situated on the canal dividing Evanston from lily-white Skokie. According to Amy’s mother, nearly half the church’s teenagers came into the world at Center Hospital, and each could claim a single, courageous black woman, Dr. Jennifer Hale, as the person who saw them before their own mothers and spanked wind into their lungs. Amy said that decades earlier when Hale, a beautiful, buff-colored young doctor with the gentility one associates with Creoles, arrived in Evanston, she discovered that

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