ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

3.

What else might he say?

Who can tell? This is the silent Red, the even more silent Malcolm, the Malcolm described by the later, vocal Malcolm as deluded, prisoner of a false consciousness, a black man's stunted life in the white devil's world, intoxicated by alcohol, drugs and sex. This is the Malcolm who talks a smooth line, who steals whatever isn't chained, sells whatever gets the green. But this language is lost in that moment.

Eunice seems to see what's on his mind but can't find words. "Maybe so. Maybe we're the biggest fools of the world." The war is over, and the changes that were supposed to be coming, where are they?

Malcolm would speak, speak well, speak movingly, made the opportunity for himself to speak a language now familiar to us, one which made an example of his earlier self, made it an object, something pre-Malcolm, not-Malcolm. By any means necessary. I'm not against violence in self-defense. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us. I don't know if I could start a race war; I don't know if I'd want to stop one. The violence of the white man against himself is just chickens coming home to roost. What is logical to the oppressor isn't logical to the oppressed. No, I am not an American. We ourselves can best solve our problems.

Much of this Malcolm must have already been alive in his earlier incarnation. He was transformed in jail by his reading and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, but a foundation must already have been laid. He knew about black nationalism from his father, Earl, a Garveyite. One day, Earl preached, black artists would provide a black Madonna and a black Christ for the proper education of African-American children. He was not cowed into submission by the threats of white hate groups in Lansing, Michigan, even though public lynchings were a staple of American society in the pre-war years. One survivor of these lynchings, James Cameron, would later found the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, which today documents the crimes that took 30,000 lives during this era which denied due process to black men, for whom the accusation of having committed a crime was too often their death warrant. These lynchings were not done secretly. They could be advertised in the local paper, ballyhooed if there was fear of not a large enough crowd. Coming upon a hanged body in the square of a small town in Indiana one morning, a county coroner prepared to cut him down in preparation for burial. A white-hooded man rode up on his farm horse: "Touch that man before noon and you'll join him. We need to set an example." Earl Little was cut in half on the Lansing railroad tracks. Malcolm's mother Louise told her children the story again and again.

James Cameron had been living in Indiana. He was 16, hanging out with two older boys. He wanted to act cool so when they decided to pull an armed robbery, he stuck with them. They went up a dark, well-known path through some woods by a cornfield to a lover's lane and there found a white couple in a car, embracing. The oldest of the three boys pulled the man out through the driver's side and threatened him with a gun. They started fighting. In the distance, James heard police sirens. He knew this man from town and no longer wanted a part in this. He took off back down the lane. About halfway down the road he heard shots. The flashing lights of a police car came in off the road in the direction he was running. James turned into the corn, made his way out past the squad car, ran home; he lied to his mother when she asked if he was in trouble. Then the police came and though she filled the room with screaming they arrested James along with the other two. The three spent a few hours in the precinct, then were bussed to the township jail. James overheard a radio broadcast say that three black men had killed a white man. The man was dead! From the flagpole outside the precinct, the bloody shirt of the dead man pulleyed upward into the night.

Cars began to pull up outside the jail, honking horns. Men came out shouting. James looked down from the window on the third floor of the jail. Headlights and torches illuminated the crowd. They began chanting, GIVE THEM UP! A group of men stormed into the prison past the few guards, who didn't want to get in a shootout with so many people. GIVE THEM UP! Many of the people they recognized, even called their friends. WHERE ARE THEY! James had backed into the corner of his cell, but they came and took the three of them and walked them into the town square. One end of the rope snaked out and twisted itself on a tree limb. Two others followed. The men hanged the first two as James watched. He tried to tell them he'd had nothing to do with the shooting. But it was all deranged, he couldn't speak anymore and the giant tree upon which the other two boys were hanged branched out blackly above his head like a hungry spider, the clouds above massing wildly. They put the noose around his neck.

It was then a voice came out of the sky, the voice of heaven, a sweet female voice, soft, soothing and quieting the din of the mob. The voice told the crowd that James hadn't done what they were accusing him of, that he was innocent. An invisible arm extended out of the heavens and touched his shoulder. It guided him down from the tree and the crowd dispersed. Some members of the mob apologized to him as they led him away from the square.

"It's some weird shit," says Red. "But I don't want to be nobody's fool."

Eunice looks at him. She unscrews the lid of a jar of Bromo Seltzer and puts a spoonful in a glass of water.

Red watches her take the fizzing glass to her lips and slowly gulp it down.

"But that's not all, Mom. Like I say, it's weird. But I've always felt I was destined for something. Some sort of, I don't know, revelation. You know, like the cats in the Bible."

"The Bible?" Eunice almost chokes on the last swallow. "That ain't no weirdness," she says, but doesn't say anymore. It may be she's being set up.

"Well, I can't imagine it not being weird, Mom. I can't quite explain it. But I feel I was put here for some reason, I can't say what it is."

"I know you're not a bad man, Red." Eunice isn't sure of what he wants from her. "You just get crazy sometimes, but down deep you're probably good."

"Naw, I ain't good. I feel like I'm gonna bust with hate." Tears begin in his eyes.

Suddenly, Eunice's defenses come down and she feels like hugging this dangerous man, so newly vulnerable. She touches his shoulder. "That's okay, son. Let it out."

Malcolm fights back the urge, stiffening at the feel of her hand. Words come instead. "I didn't fight in no war. Now everybody's home and the world's supposed to have changed. But I ain't seen no change, and I know you ain't either, except for it's harder to make a buck."

"That's the truth."

"But that wasn't none of my war and this ain't none of my peace neither. Lots of my boys came back in boxes. Lots of 'em. For what? White man still owns everything and is always gonna. Fools are the only ones think that's gonna change. Don't make no sense. You think the way they treat us has changed in the least?"

"No rightminded person think that, Red. Not if they got eyes in their heads."

"That's what I'm saying. I feel like I got eyes not just for myself but for everyone I see around me, like I'm seeing through eyes they don't know they got. And I'm all the time trying to keep that side of me shut off. It don't help pay the man."

"No it don't."

"My father was a preacher. Did you know that? He was killed by the white man. He was killed by the white man because he told the truth to his face."

"Your daddy's still deep inside you, child. Your daddy ain't never gonna keep still."

"Then I'm going to end up just like him."

"That's not for certain, Red. We can't never know the reason what we're here for."

Red laughs. "We're sure talking some jive here, ain't we?"

"Ain't jive if it's from yourself, Red. I just never heard this side of you before. You a regular John the Baptist." Having stifled it this far, Eunice lets go her own laugh and it's big and loud. It shakes her like a wind blowing through her body. "John the Baptist," she says again between breaths.

"Ain't I worked some kind a miracle tonight finding the only white man in Manhattan that ain't getting any?"

"You sure are, honey," laughs Eunice. "Saint Red, you sure are."

STORY CONTINUES | PAGE 4