Dreamer was published by Scribner in 1998. The novel’s premise is both historical and metaphysical: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference hires Chaym Smith, a man who looks remarkably like Martin Luther King Jr., to serve as a decoy — to appear at events where assassination threats have been made, to draw the fire that is always aimed at King. Smith’s physical resemblance to King is uncanny; his inner life is King’s negative image. Where King is disciplined, philosophical, and committed to nonviolence, Smith is chaotic, self-destructive, and intimately familiar with violence.
Johnson uses the doubling to explore the philosophical foundations of King’s nonviolent movement — not the political strategy (which is well documented) but the inner discipline: what does it take to absorb violence without returning it? What kind of consciousness can genuinely love an enemy? And what happens to the rage that nonviolence does not express? Smith embodies the suppressed shadow — the fury, the exhaustion, the human cost of maintaining sainthood under conditions of constant threat.
The novel is set in the months leading up to King’s assassination in April 1968, and its structure moves between Smith’s perspective and the historical events of King’s final year: the Chicago housing campaign, the opposition to the Vietnam War, the Poor People’s Campaign. Johnson’s King is neither icon nor debunked hero but a man working at the edge of his capacity, sustained by a philosophical practice (rooted in Gandhi, Thoreau, and the Black church) that costs him everything.
Collecting Dreamer
First edition (Scribner, New York, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80