America's Prophet (29 page)

In Memphis the night of April 3, King didn’t pull himself out of it. Just past ten o’clock, as a tornado destroyed forty trailer homes north of Memphis, King reached the end of his sermon. He recounted the bomb scare that had delayed his plane that morning in Atlanta, and said that when he came to Memphis, some warned him that the death threats were so loud, something might happen “from some of our sick white brothers.” “I don’t know what will happen now,” he said. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now.” He took a breath as the audience blurted, “Amen.” Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Taylor Branch captures what happened next:

When William Bradford landed with the Pilgrims on Cape Cod in December 1620, one of the first comparisons he made was to the final scene of the Five Books when Moses climbs to the top of Mount Nebo and peers longingly over the Jordan into the Promised Land he will not enter. When George Washington died in December 1799, one of the most quoted verses in his eulogies came from the same chapter of the Bible, in which the heralded leader leaves his young nation to carry on without him. When Abraham Lincoln was killed in April 1865, the scriptural passage that Henry Ward Beecher and many others cited to comfort a shocked and bewildered nation was also Deuteronomy 34. “This is the land of which I swore to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” God says to Moses. “‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.”

On the eve of his death in April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., his name alone containing echoes of one of the great Mosaic figures of Christianity, Martin Luther, invoked the same passage of the Hebrew Bible to describe his own struggle. And as he had done since the opening of his national ministry in New York City a dozen years earlier, he once more used his talk to collapse time, linking the American South with ancient Egypt, the muddy flats of Memphis, Tennessee, with the sandy plains of Memphis, Egypt. He telescoped American history, connecting the Pilgrims’ errand into the wilderness with the patriots’ flight from the oppression of King George, weaving Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves into the march of the sanitation workers for greater rights. All these disparate moments became intermingled in the unity of divine cosmos, with King boldly placing himself at their lead, before he, too, is swept off the precipice to allow God’s children to march forward, fatherless and full of fear.

I read King’s final words to Andrew Young, then found myself speechless, unable to formulate a question. “It’s almost unbelievable,” I said.

“It is,” Young said, “except that I had heard him make similar speeches on at least two other occasions. They were speeches when he was afraid, and when he thought death was near. But you could tell on this night, when he started talking about seeing the Promised Land, that he was thinking about his end.”

“There’s a great debate among people who love the Bible,” I said, “as to whether Moses, after leading the Israelites across the Red Sea, putting up with their rebellions and their kvetching and complaining, climbing up and down Mount Sinai so many times with those tablets,
then leading the people for thirty-eight more years while they get their act together, should have been allowed to enter the Promised Land. What do
you
think? Is it a tragedy?”

“You know, I never questioned it,” this lifelong preacher said. “With Moses, I always thought it had something to do with his being a murderer. He had served, but it was time for new leadership. He was almost not worthy of going to the Promised Land.

“With Martin,” he continued, “it was similar. I felt that he couldn’t have led us into the Promised Land in the flesh, but he could in the spirit. And it was his spirit that empowered our movement from the time of his death on. When he was killed, I was really”—he thought for a second—“fussy. My grandmother used to get angry with God because he wouldn’t take her home. She was ready to die and she bemoaned the fact that God was making her live on. I felt the same way about Martin. Death was the easy way out. Death would get him out of all this pressure and anxiety. And my attitude was, ‘Dammit, you’ve gone off and left me.’ I would much rather to have died with him, or instead of him, than to have to face the world without him.”

He sat silent for a moment. “But we never had to face the world without him,” he said. “His spirit has been more powerful in death than it was in life. And I suspect that’s the way it was with Moses, too. When you come to the end of a God-ordained time, something new has to take over.”

“So it was not a tragedy,” I said.

“I don’t think so. It was a triumph. That’s where the Christian angle comes into the Moses narrative. We switch very quickly from the cross to the resurrection. And from the wilderness to the Promised Land.”

“So let me ask you a question,” I said. “It’s a question that was debated about Martin Luther King his whole life.” During the Montgomery boycott, I mentioned,
American Negro
called him “the Ala
bama Moses.”
Jet
put him on its cover with the line “Alabama’s Modern Moses.” John Lewis called him a Moses; Ralph Abernathy agreed. “Was he a Moses?” I asked.

Young did not hesitate. “In many ways he was,” he said. “He was Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was humanity. But humanity in the hands of God. And that’s what made the difference—that he put himself in God’s hands. And that’s what Moses did. One of the things that strengthened Martin’s leadership is that he realized he didn’t have to be perfect. God has always used frail human beings. And God was using him. There’s a calypso song that says Moses was a murderer and God used him to lead his children out of Egypt. Not all prophets are judged by their moral perfection. They’re judged by the poignancy of their proclamations. And Martin Luther King left a glorious proclamation.”

THE LORRAINE MOTEL
could not be a more dismal place. The poorly constructed motel with turquoise metal doors and flimsy white curtains deteriorated in the years after 1968 and was foreclosed in 1982. A local foundation purchased the bankrupt site and converted it to the National Civil Rights Museum. Lining the walkway to the front door are bricks from donors: Maya Angelou, Colin Powell, Rosa Parks, Yitzhak Rabin. A metal sculpture displays a quote from Genesis 37, the scene in which Joseph is thrown into a pit by his jealous brothers after he receives the coat of many colors from his father, Jacob. “They said one to another, ‘Here comes that dreamer! Let us slay him and we shall see what becomes of his dreams!’”

When I first started writing about the Bible, I found it hard to grasp and accept the degree of shadow, oral history, and re-creation that went into creating the text. In particular the stories of the Five Books of Moses, which would have taken place hundreds of years
before they were first written down, were passed down from generation to generation, inevitably going through changes, improvements, maybe even exaggerations. As happens with almost any story, heroes became more heroic, villains more villainous, miracles more miraculous. The process seems so alien today in a world of warts-and-all public figures and real-time paparazzi. There are no more heroes, right?

But walk a few paces in Martin Luther King’s footsteps and you begin to see how even in a span of a few decades a similar process of sanctification is already happening to him. Even with all the people trying to harm him during his life—he had more than one FBI mole traveling with him in Memphis that week—a similar process of excavation, revision, and retelling is well under way. Stepping into the motel, I was struck by the power of narrative to turn this pedestrian place into a symbol of American loss. Just as Plymouth Harbor can become the Red Sea and the Ohio River the Jordan, the Lorraine Motel can be seen as Mount Nebo. And Martin Luther King can be transformed into an American prophet. Just when the Bible threatens to seem distant and archaic, I walk into a place like this and realize the impulse behind the writing of sacred scripture is still alive today.

Room 306 is on the second floor, overlooking a parking lot that in 1968 contained a swimming pool. The door opens onto a small, covered concrete walkway. Today the room has been preserved as a shrine, including a copy of the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
with the headline
RACIAL PEACE SOUGHT BY TWO NEGRO PASTORS
, a Bible, a black telephone, ruffled sheets, and an orange drink. The room has two beds, one for Abernathy, one for King. I found it jolting that a man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize and was one of the most recognizable Americans in the world was bunking two to a room in a two-story motel because he wasn’t welcome in any other part of town.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of April 4, 1968, Andrew Young returned to the Lorraine after a bruising day in court defending the upcoming march. “Martin threw me down and started beating me with a pillow,” he told me. “He was like a big kid. He was berating me because I hadn’t reported to him. Finally I snatched a pillow and started swinging back. People started throwing pillows and piling on top on everybody, laughing and going on.”

An hour later, Billy Kyles arrived. A veteran of recent marches, he was serving as King’s unofficial host, and his wife had invited King and his colleagues for dinner. She had rallied the best cooks in their church to lay out a feast of roast beef, pork chops, turnip greens, candied sweet potatoes, and mounds of desserts. “King was really loose,” Kyles told me. “I told him dinner was at five o’clock. But King had called the house and my wife told him dinner was really at six. So I went over to the room to get him, and he said, ‘Oh, no. Dinner is not until six, and I’m in no hurry. Have a seat.’ He was never in a hurry. That’s why I told him five.”

Samuel “Billy” Kyles was born in Shelby, Mississippi, in 1934. After a brief stint in Chicago, he moved to Memphis in 1959 to become the pastor of Monumental Baptist Church, a position he still holds. Tall, debonair, and gracious, with a graying mustache and wide smile, he had the serene demeanor of an apostle to history, and he reminded me of Nelson Mandela or Sidney Poitier, both of whom he’s shown around the Lorraine Motel, as well as Desmond Tutu, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Lech Walesa, a total of eight Nobel laureates. He agreed to meet me at the spot of the killing to discuss King’s final hour. Within several minutes, I could see that he didn’t have the smoothed-over rage that Andrew Young still seemed to harbor. I asked him if he was angry during the peak years of the movement. “I learned very early,” he said, “and Martin talked about it all the time, that hatred is more damaging to the hater than it is to
the hated. My juices were flowing. I was more than disappointed. But I was not angry.”

“Then what motivated you?” I asked.

“The knowledge, without being arrogant, that we were right. I don’t think we thought what we were doing was going to change the world, but we believed it would change more than our neighborhood. And eventually it did change the world. Freedom-loving people all over the globe use Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as the model.”

King, Abernathy, and Kyles spent the five o’clock hour sitting together in room 306. “So the world will ask, ‘What did three preachers do in a room for an hour?’” Kyles said. “I say, ‘We talked preacher talk.’ It was lighthearted. Ralph said, ‘I don’t know what kind of food we’re gonna have tonight, ’cause Billy’s wife is too pretty to cook.’ Martin loved a good joke. He said a preacher who can’t tell a good joke, don’t even fool with him, he can’t preach either. Then I picked out his tie, and about quarter to six we walked out on the balcony.”

Reverend Kyles led me onto the narrow walkway that could have been on any roadside motel from the era. Across the parking lot and a narrow street was the back of South Main Street and a row of six-and seven-story buildings that contained a firehouse and Bessie Brewer’s flophouse. It was so close you could throw a football to there from where I stood.

At four o’clock that afternoon an escaped convict had bought a pair of binoculars nearby and was now stationed with a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster in a bathroom window of the boarding house, where he had a clear view of room 306. Arriving on the balcony, King joked with Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson down below in the parking lot and asked the bandleader to play “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at that night’s meeting. “I turned to go down the stairs,” Kyles told me. “I got about five steps and a sound rang out.
Kabpoooooooooow
. At first I thought it was a car backfiring, but I turned and saw people ducking and then I knew it was a shot. I looked up where the shot came from. Then I looked back and Martin had been knocked from the railing onto the balcony. I rushed to his side. There was a tremendous hole in the side of his face. Blood was everywhere.”