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144 4 DREAMER: “IF THOU DOEST WELL, SHALT THOU NOT BE ACCEPTED?” It is reasonable to believe that if the problems of Chicago, the nation’s second largest city, can be solved, they can be solved everywhere. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. —The Book of Genesis Out of the vast repertoire of Western myth, one myth stands apart for the extraordinary longevity and variousness of its appeal. This is the Cain–Abel story, which has been present to the Western consciousness since the biblical era as one of the defining myths of our culture. —Richard J. Quinones, The Changes of Cain The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. —Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality In Dreamer, Johnson continues to explore a range of ontological and moral questions. Dreamer is a deeply philosophical novel that, like its predecessors Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, is rooted in the past. In this instance, the past is not Spartanburg, South Carolina, of the 1840s, nor New Orleans of the 1830s. In Dreamer, all thoughts and actions are grounded in the more recent past of Chicago of the 1960s; indeed, in this fourth novel Johnson returns to the landscape and period that served as the chief site and framework for his first philosophical novel, Faith and the Good Thing. As a work of creative historical fiction, the subject of Dreamer is the modern civil rights movement and the life of the man who was at the center of this recent stage in what the historian Vincent Harding terms the black freedom struggle.1 145 Dreamer Of course, the man in question is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Baptist minister, architect of the modern civil rights movement, Nobel Laureate for Peace, great advocate for peace in Vietnam, and, according to Johnson, this nation’s “preeminent moral philosopher.”2 While the modern civil rights movement has been the subject of fiction for many contemporary African American writers, such as Ernest J. Gaines of In My Father’s House and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker of Meridian, and Toni Morrison of Song of Solomon, Johnson is the first writer to create a novel in which King emerges as a character. Johnson captures King in the last two years of his life when he had sought to apply Gandhian satyagraha (soul force) or the strategy of nonviolent direct action to the Chicago Movement and the Poor People’s Campaign of Memphis, Tennessee. The arc of the novel essentially spans the years between January 23, 1966, when King took up residence with his family in the Lawndale tenement at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue, and April 4, 1968, following his assassination in Memphis and the period of national mourning that culminated in his funeral in Atlanta, Georgia. The several questions related to sacrifice, leadership, kinship, morality , ideology, revolution, and transformation that figure prominently in the novel are subsumed, I would like to suggest, within one question. This question is bodied forth in the lives of many of the novel’s characters, but chiefly through the protagonist: Chaym Smith, King’s twin or double and an exKorean veteran who, after a sojourn in southeast Asia, has taken up residence in Chicago in search of work. The central question of the novel is, I maintain , How can we end evil without engendering error or evil?3 This question is first introduced in the form of a meditation by Matthew Bishop, a twenty-four-year-old civil rights aid with the Chicago branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), philosophy major at Columbia College, and the novel’s narrator. Idealistic, bookish, reserved, and conventional in appearance, he is, in other words, the type of person easily overlooked and easily forgotten. Through the character of Bishop, Johnson pays tribute to that great crowd of anonymous salaried workers and volunteers who were foot soldiers in the Dreamer’s great army of social reform . As he reflects upon the growing violence that threatens to unravel King’s campaign to challenge segregation in Chicago, Bishop introduces the question that is the expanding floor for all other questions in the novel in the following manner: “Gun sales soared in Slavic districts, and I wondered, as the minister must have wondered, if it was possible to...

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