Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean [Hardcover ed.] 1556522177, 9781556522178

Citation preview

W

I1ARIN COUNTY FREE

LIBRARY

31111015159419

•

V

/ MALCOLM X in Africa,

and the Caribbean

*

i

m

$24.95 ..lost thirty

years after Malcolm X's assassination, his

autobiography continues to

sell

more than 150,000 copand films

in

the 1990s have generated a groundswell of interest

in

ies

the

a year, and a spate of books,

man who

articles,

redefined America through his analysis of

racism and his activism

the service of Black libera-

in

tion worldwide. But, in the process, as Jan

observes

in

Carew

Ghosts in Our Blood, the significance of

Malcolm's legacy has often eluded us. "The real Malcolm,"

he writes, "was far more complex than the millions of

words written about him, the speeches that he made, or the plethora of distorted

images strewn

in

the

wake

of his untimely death." lyricism of the poet with the breadth

Combining the

of the scholar, Carew,

colm

in Britain

influenced the revolutionary's thinking

toward the end of

his life, captures

lectual in pursuit of

political

whose conversations with Mal-

a new vision

movement

Malcolm the

intel-

of race and a global

uniting progressive Blacks and

whites. For the first time, readers will gain an intimate

knowledge of Malcolm's breakthrough to an internationalist vision following his historic trip to

Mecca,

among

his

the Black

travels throughout Africa,

and

expatriate community

London. Central also to the

in

his life

intricate discussions that transpire

Carew

is

their

unfolds in the

common first

between Malcolm and

Caribbean heritage, which Carew

full-fledged treatment of the history

of Malcolm's Grenadian

and Garveyite mother.

Written by one of the major figures on the PanAfrican political landscape in this century, Ghosts in

Blood

will

deepen our understanding

that shaped Malcolm X.

of the

Our

many forces

r1

IS

OUR

'

GHOST I

3

JR

ll OD With

MALCOLM X in Africa,

England,

and the Caribbean

LAWRENCE

HILL

BOOKS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carew, Jan R. Ghosts in our blood with Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the 1st ed. Caribbean /Jan Carew. cm. p. ISBN 1-55652-218-5 (pbk.) ISBN 1-55652-217-7 $24.95. :

—

—

:

:

$14.95

X, Malcolm, 1925-1965. 2. Racism—United States. 3. Race relations. 4. Race relations Great Britain. Race relations. 6. Carew, Jan R. I. X, Malcolm, 5. Great Britain 1925-1965. II. Title. 1.

United States

—

—

—

BP223.Z8L57247 320.5'4

,

1994

092— dc20

©1994

94-2702 CIP

by Jan Carew

All rights reserved

Published by Lawrence Hill Books

An

imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Chicago,

Illinois

Street

60610

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2

1

For Joy, Shantoba, the late Victor Ramzes, and my friend and countryman Miles Fitzpatrick

PREFACE The real Malcolm X was far more complex than the millions of empty words written about him, the speeches he made different stages of his

life,

at

or the plethora of distorted images

strewn in the wake of his untimely death. Over the decades since his death, there has

been a concerted effort to iconize him and, in so

doing, to distance him further and further from the mother who had given birth to him, his brothers and sisters, his wife and children, and his ancestors. By making him an icon, however, the host of idolators and their numbers increase with each new generation are somehow reenacting the Antaeus legend. The higher their iconized figure is lifted above the earth, the weaker and more indistinct the real Malcolm X becomes in their imaginations. As a result, they are less inclined to heed his warnings and are more reluctant to live the austere life he had chosen. Ultimately, they find it impossible to truly dedicate their lives to the cause of Black liberation for which he died. We need to bring Malcolm back to earth and to humanize his memory. The time has come to frame him against the background of an extended family and then place him in the context of the larger community of people in America and abroad who influenced him and whom he, in turn, influenced. By an accident of fate, I met Malcolm X at the end of the most important fourteen months in his political life. In just over a year, he had broken away from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, founded the Organization of African Unity and Muslim Mosque,

—

vii

—

GHOSTS

MM Inc.,

made

a

IN

OUR BLOOD

second pilgrimage to Mecca, and declared

speeches, both in the United States and abroad, that he to join forces with

all

major

in

was

willing

people fighting for freedom from oppression.

was during these hectic months, too, that he was reunited with mother after twenty-five years. Malcolm seemed to be racing against time during that final year of his life. Between December 1964 and February 1965, he visited Britain twice. In the course of those visits he made the most sophisticated, brilliant, and conciliatory speeches of his career.

It

his

In early

December, immediately

Mecca, he took part

in a

most famous debating February 11,

less

after his

second pilgrimage to

debate at the Oxford Union, one of the

societies in the English-speaking world.

than three months

later,

On

he was invited back to

London by the African Society to address a large audience in the Old Theatre at the London School of Economics. In both addresses, Malcolm moved the political discourse from civil rights to

human

clearly and unequivocally that the Black had to be internationalized rather than ghettoized. He also affirmed with the passionate conviction that was his trademark his willingness to work with people of goodwill rights

and stated

liberation struggle

regardless of their race, color, or creed. I

was informed of Malcolm's presence

in

London while I was Commonwealth

attending a grand, very British reception at the Institute to celebrate the first issue of

Magnet, a newspaper

I

had

founded to reach the Black readership in Britain. Responding to a last

minute invitation to the reception, Malcolm turned up,

playing grace and impeccable good manners as friends, acquaintances, diplomats,

and

I

dis-

introduced him to

journalists.

Our

conversa-

which form the basis for this book, began late that night of the reception and continued over the next two days until his speech tions,

at the

London School

Little did last

with

I

know

of Economics.

would be my first and A week after returning to

that these conversations

this inspirational revolutionary.

Malcolm X would be assassinated. When Malcolm came to Britain, he was welcomed by a Third World immigrant population drawn mostly from the West Indies, the United States,

Jan Caren

and the Indian subcontinent. As a descendant himself from

Africa,

a

ix

Grenadian mother, as a Pan-Africanist and a Garveyite, and as a

Muslim, Malcolm

in

1965 could reach people from

a

broad range

of backgrounds.

Of

all

that

I

the years after

knew about Malcolm X, what intrigued me most in his assassination was that his Grenadian mother had

been almost invariably passed over

in biographical writings

about

was not convinced firmly of the importance of this missing until I was visiting Bacolet, Grenada, in 1980 and happened upon the village matriarch, Tanta Bess. The oral tradition is alive and well in Tanta Bess, who had grown up with Louise Langdon Louise Langdon Norton Little, Malcolm's mother. him.

I

Caribbean link

—

Listening to Tanta Bess

I

inquiring wisely: "Didn't these great

men

stones?"

not just

I

fall

grandmothers,

out of the sky

discovered in talking with Tanta Bess that

out of the sky

fall

become was shaped

And

—have

aunts, wives, or did they just

sisters,

your history book

in

Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, and the others mothers,

my mother's voice as my history homework,

could hear echoes of

she sat at the head of a long table supervising

yet,

my

in

like a stone

but that the

no small measure by

conversations with

his

Malcolm

like

Malcolm did he would

man

Grenadian mother. in

1965,

my

chance

and my growing interest in exploring the influence of Louise Little on her famous son were not brought into clear focus until I met Paul Lee, a bright young research scholar, who introduced me to Malcolm's brother Wilfred in 1990. Wilfred, I soon learned, was not only one of Paul's mentors, he was also the mentor to several generations of encounter with Tanta Bess more than a decade

later,

Black youth in Detroit.

My at his

first

serious conversations with Wilfred took place in

home

in Detroit

and

at

mine

in

Bloomington,

Illinois. In

talking about his mother, he also provided insights into Little

household

in

1991

life

in the

Omaha, Nebraska (where Malcolm was born

Indiana Harbour (East Chicago) area, where Earl was the chief representative of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); and in Lansing, Michigan, where the family moved in 1928. in 1925); in the Little

GHOSTS

IN

OIR BLOOD

and Louise Langdon Norton, who had met at a Garveyite meeting in Montreal in 1918, were profoundly influenced by and devoted followers of Garvey and his UNIA. Garvey Both Earl

was

Little

a self-educated

Jamaican

who had emerged from anonymity

in

worldwide Black nationalist the United States and had its

the early twentieth century to create a

movement. His UNIA was based in largest mass following there. He had declared: "I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free." After meeting in Montreal, Earl and Louise were married in 1919 and

moved

to the United States,

where they raised seven children, of and Malcolm the fourth.

whom

Wilfred was the eldest

Wilfred insisted that his father never was a Baptist preacher as so

many

He

was, Wilfred declared em-

whom

sympathetic Black ministers

biographers have claimed.

phatically, a Garveyite activist

allowed to address their congregations from time to time.

When

Earl Little was in his prime, Wilfred asserted, "he was the strongest man I ever knew." But he was crushed under a streetcar in Lansing

when Wilfred was twelve and Malcolm six. Louise Little and other UNIA members believed that Earl was beaten and

in

1931,

thrown to his death by vigilantes from the Black Legion, a splinter group of the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps most important for a complete portrait of Malcolm X, Wilfred painted a vivid picture of his mother's courage and perseverance in maintaining her family's

death of her husband. The Louise

Little

life

after the untimely

portrayed by Wilfred was

and courageous woman who was consistently treated with cruelty and insensitivity by racist and sexist officials. The culmination of this tale of persecution came in 1939, when Louise, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was committed to the Michigan state mental hospital at Kalamazoo. She would remain a talented

Malcolm and other family memhad her released into their care. Malcolm is reputed to have that his reunion with his mother was the happiest moment of

there for twenty-five years until

bers said his I

life.

was impelled

to write this

book so

that

new dimensions

of

Jan Carew

Malcolm X's

life

could be brought to

xi

light. In

Malcolm threaded

relatively short lifetime,

his

the course of a

way through

a

bewildering array of experiences that mirrored the inequalities, the tensions, the racism,

legacy

is

his

and the hope

in

our society. His principal

examination of the United States and

imperialist extensions

its

worldwide

from the bottom looking upward. Conspic-

uously absent from his often searing analysis of race and class in

America and abroad, therefore, was any trace of the dishonest intellectual palliatives that scholars from both the left and the right use to obfuscate the truth as they peer from the top looking

downward. He taught us

that

devastatingly critical of their

During

my

it

own

is

the duty of leaders to be as

mistakes as of their opponents'.

conversations with Malcolm, he never failed to state

unequivocally that the system he was attacking was one based on unbridled greed, on the exploitation of one race by another and

one

class

by another, and that

it

had to be

radically transformed.

He also made it clear that his role as a leader was not just to analyze the world, but to change

it.

ONE The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

—William Blake

An obscure

vision,

obscure because he dared not free

from his consciousness and examine to half look at

it;

it

he was content

and seek no explanation.

it,

—Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Corn

It

was a February morning in Wimbledon when I heard Malcolm X's assassination.

the

news

of

On

that fateful morning, as

peered through

above London if

slits

in

I

lay in bed, the sun's eye twice

low-hanging clouds that were scattered

like looted bales of

that luminous eye

London with a furtive their way through wet

soot-smudged cotton.

It

was

as

was surveying my southwestern corner of glance, scanning rooftops, vehicles beetling streets,

dark trees with skeletal limbs raised

imploringly toward heaven, and stretches of Wimbledon

Common

carpeted with dead leaves and frost-singed grass.

By the time the second shaft of sunlight had shot through my bedroom window, I was already fully awake. I thought of going for my usual run on Wimbledon Common, but I was tired after having 1

GHOSTS

01 R BLOOD

IN

barely snatched four hours sleep, and rated like apparitions in a fog.

I

patina of frost on the branches of the

A

back garden.

my good intentions evapomy side and noticed a gnarled copper beech in my

turned on

pair of starlings, perched

on

a high branch, fluffed

out their feathers and huddled close together. I

spoke

feathers

softly to the starlings, but they buried their

and

moment I wished

for a

under the covers for the If

you were

like

that

I

could bury

my life. man from Guyana

heads

in their

my own head

rest of

me, a Black

living alone in

an

old Victorian house after an acrimonious break with an angry

English wife and four bewildered children

daughters and one of

my own —talking

—three

English step-

to birds, plants, trees,

anything that was alive but not human, would seem to be a

Magnet, the weekly Black had finally rolled off the press at the end twenty-hour workday, and I was still in a stupor of

perfectly natural thing to do. Besides,

newspaper

I

of a hectic

was

editing,

exhaustion.

But the sunlight, even appearing and vanishing as swiftly as

it

had done, also awakened some sleeping thoughts that burned so brightly in my brain that even after pulling the covers over my head I

could not banish them.

"What am

I

doing here in

country with

this inhospitable

its

had often done on so many twilight-mornings. "You're a man from a land of sun and trade winds and a sea of evergreen forests. Why on earth " But I'd invariably cut short that sorry-for-myself lament and remind miserable climate?"

I

asked myself as

I

—

myself loudly, "Well, you can't eat sun or drink the trade winds. Besides, the British are there in your country living off the fat of the land.

And even

from across the

if

they

boorish, racist to the

climate

is

left,

they'd

Atlantic. So

still

be sucking

whether or not the

marrow

that

I

wealth dry

of their bones, and the English

lousy, you'd better just stay here

what they owe you." The fact is, though,

its

British are cold,

and

had ended up

collect a

in

little

of

Wimbledon, a owner of my

middle-class English sanctuary, because the former

house, a Trotskyist

H

member

of Parliament with an eccentric

Jan Carew disdain for his comfortable, middle-class legacy, had sold

Coming

it

to

me

had been perfectly natural. After all, it had been dinned into my head from as far back as I could remember that England was the "mother country." Then, too, having arrived in London, I found that my colonial middle-class education helped to round off some of the sharp edges of the initial for a song.

to Britain

culture shock. This education included studying Latin, English,

and European history along with a wide spectrum of English literature.

What was

the history of

studiously avoided

Guyana, outside of

its

related to

colonial connections.

of this colonial education,

also because

was anything

which

It

was

a cynical classmate

had declared was designed to make us stupidly loyal to king, country, and the Union Jack, that I had christened my Wimbledon residence "The House of Despair." "How come you chose such a morose name for your house?" several friends had inquired. "Everybody chooses cheerful, grandiose, or cute house names, so I decided to be different," I'd explain, but the real reason was more complicated. The truth is that when the solicitor was showing me around the house for the first time, he'd said facetiously that "this Victorian mansion is divided into three parts, like Caesar's Gaul." And the mention of Caesar's Gaul immediately took me back to the days when I was a student at Berbice High School and had to study Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War for my junior Cambridge Latin exam. The rush of memories made me inattentive to his very English voice describing the property in

nodded and smiled foolishly while remembering how Ramotar, a Hindu classmate who was a midnight-black Madrasee with shiny patent-leather hair and glittering eyes, had told me quite matter-of-factly: "You know, the blasted Julius Caesar, whose work we keep reciting like parrots, suffered from fits."

some

detail.

I

"Fits? Caesar?"

I

recalled asking incredulously, because this

piece of information about the great man's

suddenly far more interesting to

me

human

frailty

was

than his conquest of Gaul.

"Yes, the damn man was an epileptic! Don't you remember the words from our memory passage in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

GHOSTS

4

and when

how

the

Years

later,

the solicitor

I

came

when

lips

01 R

BLOOD

was on him,

fit

he did shake;

His coward

IN

'tis

I

mark god did shake.

did

true, this

did from their color fly

to regret that

I

.

didn't listen

he was showing

.

more

me around

carefully to

the house.

An

unusually heavy snowfall and the prolonged cold spell that came in

wake caused

its

the outside pipes to burst

and sprout

stalactites,

and I had to live without running water for weeks. The House of Despair turned out to be a very appropriate name for

my Wimbledon

bittersweet

life

in

residence, since, in addition to burst pipes,

London was

nial activity, solitary periods of writing spells of

was

my

strewn with love affairs, anticolo-

and painting, and wild

carousing followed by bouts of melancholy. Then there

that painful, traumatic discovery that

we people

of color

make

"mother country" and finding out, with a naive colonial dismay, that there's no black in the Union Jack. Visitors who traveled by subway, after leaving Wimbledon station, walking up High Street, and laboring up the steep hill to my house invariably accused me of failing to warn them that the hill was "a brute." Winded West Indian visitors would sometimes after arriving in the

even accord a

living, patriarchal personality to the hill

'That's a hill-father, man! That blasted

ing,

hill

by declar-

separates boys

from men!"

on R Street. Guests who did not know my exact address could knock on any door along the street and ask about the house in which a tall Black I

was

man

the "only one," the sole

lived,

politeness,

West Indian

living

and with an excessive show of British middle-class any neighbor could direct them to number 58.

As I was sitting at the side of my bed with a blanket wrapped around me, J.D., a Jamaican friend who worked for the BBC, phoned.

"You heard the news?" "What news?" asked. I

I

knew from

the agitation in his voice

Jan Carew

and the

fact that

he had shed his

BBC

British accent that

something

calamitous had happened.

"Malcolm, man." "Malcolm?" "Yes, man, Malcolm X, him dead, assassinated, them blew him away. Rass, man, the Brother was here only twelve days ago! Just over a week! Jesus Christ! And now them gun 'im down in the

Audubon Ballroom where he was gwine

talk 'bout his Organiza-

what him did say, that he was a marked man and some folks high up in Yankeeland had passed a death sentence 'pon 'im. That them folks was more powerful than Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslims remember how him did say that the triggermen, the bombers or whoever them send 'gainst him would be the puppets, and above them would be a puppetmaster pulling the strings. If only the Brother did listen to us, eh! We did tell him say that he should live " His voice broke off, and I could for the struggle, not die for it hear someone talking to him. "J.D.?" I said, urgently, because I wanted to hear more. "I've got to go, old chap. I'm being summoned. The BBC treadmill calls. Will contact you later!" Almost as naturally as breathing, J.D. had switched back to an impeccable British accent. J.D. hung up before I could ply him with questions. I rushed downstairs to switch on the television. But standing before the charcoal-gray screen, I changed my mind. If Malcolm was indeed dead, then I'd defer facing that ugly reality for the moment. I wanted him to be alive, and if I ignored the TV news for a while I could pretend that he was, that he'd taken our advice and gone into hiding. I slumped down on a couch, and it was as if the wind outside had sneaked under the French windows in my study and gripped my heart with icy fingers. "Why did you choose to die, Malcolm?" I shouted at the empty room. "Don't we have enough martyrs? It's time that we lived for the struggle, and not just keep tion of Afro-American Unity!

Is

the God's truth

—

dying for

When

I

it!"

finally

switched on the television, images of a body lying

GHOSTS

(>

IN

OUR BLOOD

on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom appeared on the screen, and an impersonal voice confirmed that Malcolm X had been assassinated. The dead man's face, with its pale, frozen, death-mask look, burnt itself into my mind and consciousness and would remain there for the rest of my life. Decades have gone by, but that face still appears in my mind's eye at odd moments, intruding into thoughts far removed from Malcolm and his tragic and premature death. I

have never been able, however, to

the one of the

whom

Malcolm with

I

that masklike visage onto

fit

had gaffed and laughed and

bantered and swapped reminiscences only twelve days before his

had also debated with him passionately, weighing every word, whether it was better to live for a cause than to die for it. death.

I

—

Those images of the dead Malcolm that remain with me the corpse on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom and the body lying in state in the Unity Funeral Home as mourners crocodiled their way past to pay their final respects that

was drummed

into

my

—are

skull

memory

another

like

when

I

was

still

passage

a student at

Berbice High School:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps

To

in this petty

pace from day to day

the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's

That

but a walking shadow, a poor player

struts

And then

and frets

Told by an

his

hour upon the stage

heard no more.

is

idiot, full

a tale

It is

of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Perhaps, too,

my mind

as

it

when

a vision of the

does every

now and

mirror and seeing a reminder of thing,

though,

invariably

is

comes

dead Malcolm flashes across

am in fact looking into a my own mortality. The curious then,

that the vision of

to

me

in three

I

Malcolm,

dimensions.

It is

as

alive if

a

or dead,

permanent

Jan Carew

hologram had imprinted

itself

on

my unconscious mind during our

illuminating encounters in Britain.

when I switched on the television again, there were pictures of Malcolm lying in a highly polished casket. His eyes were closed and the white linen shroud framing his face made it Later,

seem darker.

on

A

British reporter covering the funeral

soliciting reproofs

one

in the

about Malcolm's "extremism" from some-

crowd. But the

questions silenced

seemed bent

him with

men and women answering

his inane

their passionate affirmation of loyalty

to their dead hero.

Malcolm's body was wrapped that a traditional

Muslim

in the

seven white linen shrouds

burial requires.

A

Harlemite, in

all

seriousness, declared afterwards that the tears of thousands of

mourners

falling

on the polished

floor of the Unity Funeral

Home

had flooded the room until the last of the bereaved had floated away on a river of sorrow. The pictures of Malcolm's funeral were replaced on the screen by others depicting the fighting

among the white ones,

in

Vietnam.

but they were

all

I

looked for Black faces

painted black.

I

told myself

—

Malcolm would have seen the cruel irony of it all whites in brown people. The news continued with the announcer pontificating about the Armed Forces Council of South Vietnam having replaced Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh as commander in chief. And I thought that the puppet-masters in Washington were once again prodding their military satraps in Vietnam to play a political game of musical chairs. The announcer droned on, but I no longer heard what he was saying. I knew that the fatuities he was mouthing had been that

blackface invading a nation of

filtered

through sieves of

sors, subeditors,

stringers, correspondents, military cen-

and editors

until the

words were completely

divorced from the images being flashed on the screen. I

tors

told myself, "It's only minutes ago that these very

commenta-

were portraying Malcolm as an angry Black Savonarola

pointing an accusing finger at his enemies, his eyes glaring behind rimless glasses like the mother-of-pearl eyes

African devil mask."

embedded

in

an

GHOSTS

a I

felt

sad, desolate,

and

demon images sought

IN

OIR BLOOD

helpless about the

way

in

which those Mal-

to obliterate the soft-spoken, gentle

colm whose breeding and good manners had been inculcated in him from birth by his Grenadian mother and his rural Georgian father; the laughing, witty Malcolm; the pensive, lonely Malcolm; and the restless, caged Malcolm pacing up and down and express-

way

ing opinions that burnt their

incandescent

flares.

If

into one's consciousness like

only his detractors could have glimpsed

those other sides of Malcolm, they would have understood

why

Ossie Davis could say in his eloquent and moving funeral oration that

our

I

"Malcolm was our manhood, our

own

living Black

manhood

met Malcolm when

I

was

the editor of Magnet, the

first

.

.

news-

paper attempting to reach a nationwide Black readership Britain.

.

Black shining prince."

Malcolm,

in

London

of Economics, had arrived

held at the

to give a speech at the

on the day that

Commonwealth

in

London School was being

a reception

Institute to celebrate the first issue of

Magnet coming off the press. As this grand reception was getting majordomo announced the arrival of stentorian flourishes that could

into full swing, a liveried

distinguished guests with

be heard above the

hum

of

conversations and subdued laughter. The stamp of Englishness on this

gathering

was unmistakable

despite the expressionistic splash

of colorful costumes and the rainbow array of races in the

spacious

While

I

was

moving about

hall.

talking to a

German foreign correspondent, my Dermot Hussey, tugged at my sleeve

Jamaican editorial assistant, and steered me toward a corner of the

hall.

me like glass notice how those

Dermot's large Diego Rivera eyes were focused on bulbs with

fireflies in

them.

I

couldn't help but

round face with its mandarin beard and mustache. Usually, there was also a mandarin calmness about him. A Jamaican countryman of his who was small, waspish, and

eyes stood out from

his

perpetually drunk had once observed, while sprawled on a couch

Jan Carew in

my

9

room, "Jan, there are two races on earth and Brother Dermot's a listener."

living

listeners

—

But on

this occasion,

an unusually excited Dermot became more

of a talker than a listener

whisper, "Malcolm's

in

—talkers and

when he announced

in a

hoarse stage

town, man!"

"Malcolm?" "Yes, Malcolm X! He's in town, man! Malcolm X is in town!" "Then go and bring him to the reception," I said. A music critic and civil-rights activist, Dermot had a passion for Black music that bordered on fanaticism. He was also a denizen of nightclubs, cafes, restaurants, and other dives that night people patronized during the midnight to dawn hours. As a result, an underground network of friends, hustlers, musicians, music lovers, fellow journalists, and hangers-on invariably tipped him off when prominent Black Americans were

Dermot roamed

town.

the midnight jungle of

who woke up

ders with folk

The neon

in

London, rubbing shoul-

to daylight only in the late afternoon.

lights necklacing buildings like illuminated lianas

and

the faces glowing momentarily under streetlights like black,

brown, yellow, or white night orchids never

failed to fascinate him.

was during a late-night Notting Hill Gate safari that an African friend had tipped him off about Malcolm's imminent arrival. Dermot weaved his way through the crowd, dodging waiters carrying trays full of drinks or hors d'oeuvres, and in just over an hour he returned with Malcolm in tow. When the majordomo announced, "Mr. Malcolm X," conversations were muted for a moment and all eyes turned toward the tall man entering the great

It

hall.

Malcolm towered above the crowd, and there was a cool alertness about him as Dermot led him toward me. "This is Malcolm X," Dermot said, and as we shook hands the easy banter between us disguised our private thoughts, our real

impressions of each other. surprise

whose

and

I

first

impression was one of utter

Was this indeed the dark, menacing man had seen emblazoned on the pages of so many

disbelief.

picture

My

GHOSTS

10

IN

OUR BLOOD

journals? For even after being recently exposed to the African sun,

he was

me

still

my

light-complexioned, and his gray-green eyes reminded

That venerable

had been a village schoolmaster, and folks used to whisper behind his back that he had cat's eyes. And like my grandfather's, Malcolm's eyes could change from gray-green to a pale blue or a luminous gray of

late grandfather's.

flecked with gold according to the color of his his clothes, or the colors

relative

moods, the color of

around him.

My eleven-year-old daughter Lizaveta was with me, and when

I

introduced her to Malcolm, even with a crowd of admirers around

him, he managed to give her his

and to put her at ease almost immediately with a natural graciousness and good humor. He told her that he had daughters, too, and that one of them actually looked like her. It was obvious that he was good with children, that they recognized a kindred spirit in him at once, for after her initial shy

full

attention

and halting exchanges, she relaxed, and they

were soon chatting together

like old friends.

She whispered to

afterwards, "He's nice," and looking toward

him with

me

a special

up her face only when she trusted someone, she asked rhetorically, "Why do they say he's a bad man? He's tall like you, and he looks like he could be your brother." smile that

lit

That was her way of putting her own private stamp of approval on Malcolm. Usually, adults treated her with a patronizing disregard which she hated, but he had really paid attention to her and made her feel like an intelligent being who had something worthwhile to say.

"We're both red people," I explained to her jokingly, "and if he went anywhere in the Caribbean, people would immediately assume that he was a native son. That's until he spoke, because the moment he opened his mouth and said a few words, they'd know that he was a Yankeeman." As I looked around the hall that night, I couldn't help thinking that there was something incongruous about a radical Black newspaper being launched at the Commonwealth Institute. This relic from a dwindling British Empire was formerly known as the Imperial Institute. It was an unlikely setting for a friendly encoun-

^8

Jan Carew ter

with a

11

man whom the media had consistently depicted as a

fiery

advocate of Black liberation. The reception, complete with major-

domo, was, on

the surface, reminiscent of past occasions

when

victories over rebellious natives were celebrated with the same

pomp and

ceremony.

After the

majordomo announced

the arriving guests, they

shook

hands with a welcoming committee headed by Rudolph Dunbar. Rudolph, a Guyanese, was the European correspondent of the Associated Negro Press and one of the directors of Magnet.

He was

famous clarinetist and conductor and one of the Black old-timers who'd been living in London since the early 1930s. I had been opposed to an expensive and grandiose reception in a setting also a

replete with

symbols of the glory days of empire, not to speak of

the trappings of white British male supremacy, but

I

had been

outvoted by Rudolph and the other directors. The imperial symbols

and trappings

I

was denouncing were

the very ones they

had

been brought up to worship, and they were willing to pay any price

them for one night. Rudolph was mired in the aristocracy had a divine right

to co-opt

belief that a self-appointed Black

to lead the Black liberation

move-

He dismissed the majority of Black immigrants to Britain as who were letting the side down." Although I disagreed this, the writer and artist in me found Rudolph's contradic-

ment.

"riffraff

with

pompous and bigoted ideas, which he would express with a hoity-toity, upper-class British accent, he was kind and generous and compassionate and, drunk or sober, was an excellent raconteur. Malcolm later complained to me that he didn't understand half of what Rudolph had said to him when they met, and I intimated that this was probably a blessing. Rudolph was in his element that night. Decked out in white tie and tails, he greeted the dignitaries like a lord welcoming guests to his castle, and although Malcolm and I were out of earshot, I was certain that according to the status and rank of the guest, he was accompanying his welcome with the right kind of upper-class haw-haw sounds and appropriate throat noises. Malcolm, keeping his eyes fixed on Rudolph, was clearly fascitions interesting. Despite his

GHOSTS

12

IN

01 R BLOOD

nated by the performance of this Black would-be aristocrat. leaned over and said,

"When

I

get a chance,

I'll

tell

I

you about

Rudolph." "Yes, please do," he said, guardedly, never taking his eyes off

Rudolph. After a pause,

I

said,

"My Afro-Carib great-gran used to say that

the only perfect

humans were

the risen Christ,

and the Messiah who

Mary,

illusory ones like the Virgin

yet to

is

come."

Malcolm's tone was conciliatory when he turned to me, smiled,

and

said,

"Too bad I didn't come across your great-gran during when I believed that Elijah Muhammad was a divine

those years leader

and that

women were

"Tolerance?"

I

weak. But now, I'm learning

—

inquired, finishing the sentence for him.

me

Taken

wondered if I'd offended him. But he smiled again and answered, "Yes, and good sense too." aback, he looked at

searchingly,

"You'll need plenty of both here,"

"As

I

and

when

I

dealing with Black people

cautioned.

if I

don't

I

need truckloads of it back

home too!"

he declared

with a chuckle.

The reception ended with

guests

who'd had too much

to drink

lurching uncertainly toward the front entrance and being ushered

out by uniformed guards. Rudolph, incoherent, happy about the

was led away by a friend. A journalist from overseas whom I'd met earlier when he was downing Scotch as if it were lemonade, was now in the ultimate

reception and obviously deep in his cups,

state of

drunkenness. Tiptoeing unsteadily, gesturing

like a

mar-

moset, mumbling to himself, and occasionally bursting into song, he slipped on a piece of smoked salmon and

fell.

Impersonal and

immaculately dressed waiters and waitresses stepped over him very deftly as he lay stretched out

on the

floor.

He groped

for the

and began to gnaw at it. A hefty guard picked him up like a rag doll, and with his feet barely touching the ground the journalist and his piece of salmon were

offending slab of salmon, retrieved

it,

deposited in a taxi.

Dermot and I escorted Malcolm

to his taxi,

and before we parted

Jan Carew

we

agreed to meet in his hotel

room

13

at seven-thirty the following

morning.

During the long drive back to Wimbledon, and with Lizaveta fast asleep in the backseat, Dermot and I relaxed and indulged in a bout

West Indian

of

gaffing as

we

reminisced about the reception and

our meeting with Malcolm. "I can hardly wait for

bed,

I'll

write

down

tomorrow

the questions

"Then you're not going

to get

I

to

come. After I put Lizaveta to

want

to ask him."

much

sleep, Brother

Man.

It's

almost midnight already. I'm a night bird, as you already know. catch up on "Tell

me

my

sleep in the daytime.

something,

how

You

I

don't."

did you persuade the

man

himself to

come to the reception?" "He was a bit cautious at first. Then he remembered me from three months ago when he made that four-day stopover for the Oxford Union debate. So I told him about the paper and said that his presence would mean a great deal to us, and presto! he came." "That sudden decision of his to come to the reception must've thrown the spies tailing him for a loop. They wouldn't have known what the hell was going on. And can you imagine one of them following him into the reception hall, and the majordomo announcing, 'Mr. Malcolm X!' and then, 'Mr. John Doe, from the CIA!' That would really have created a sensation. You know, I didn't want us to waste money on that lavish reception, but Malcolm's turning up made me change my mind. Besides, I kept telling myself that after everything's said

To

really

understand

how

and done, old colonial

fantasies die hard.

important Garvey was, you have to over-

look the farcical business of his being decked out in the uniform of a British colonial governor.

rearing

its

head tonight

telling myself,

It

was

at the

the

same kind of strange behavior

Commonwealth

Institute, so

I

kept

'Look beyond the pure theatrical farce of backroom

boys strutting in the front parlor for a night. Let them enjoy themselves.

Tomorrow,

we'll all be involved

once again

in getting

next issue of Magnet. Old Rudolph, with his ruthless

out the

flair for

the

GHOSTS

14 limelight, in

was

IN

in his element, eh!

01 R BLOOD I

detected complete bewilderment

Malcolm's eyes when he was trying to figure him out.

was thinking

no matter how much of an

that

ass thought he was,

some of

felt

aristocrat this

the whites were

born-on-the-stroke-of-midnight nigger

I

still

who was

sure he

pompous him

seeing

as a

giving himself airs.

But Malcolm's lonely, eh! In the midst of those hundreds of guests, he

was

alone.

He reminded me

always stands by

of a greenheart tree in the rain forest.

and

itself, tall

distinct in the

It

midst of thousands of

other species."

"But the Brother has bags of charisma, eh! The minute he stepped into the main alert

and on

his

hall, all eyes

guard

all

were on him, and there he was,

the time."

"And did you notice how his hands speak all the time, even when they're in repose? Liza pointed this out to me.

That

child's

shrewd

as the devil, eh!"

"On

top of everything

else, the

Brother has the malice to have

gray-green eyes, reddish hair, and a light complexion.

know alert

something,

than he

I

is.

never met anyone in

He's a real

my

.

.

.

But you

born days who's more

Yankeeman from

Brother's got eyes in front, at the back, and

the city

on both

—that

sides of his

head."

"Man,

the

moment

he

set foot in that hall,

though, every pretty

woman

seemed to gravitate toward him. Still, as they say in Harlem, he was cool as a mountain pool. He kept those admiring women at a distance with his eyes and reserved manner, and yet every one of them

— black or white— seemed to

feel that

she

was

special."

"Man, I

if

Malcolm

could console the

man and

London, I'd keep close to him so that who'd soon find out that he is a religious

lived in

sisters

he doesn't fool around."

"Console them or prey on them? All particular question.

.

.

.

Looking

surrounded by that bevy of beautiful

man

right, don't

answer that

Malcolm while he was women, it occurred to me that at

Maybe he got that from West Indian. his mother? You know, West Indians carry a larger space around them than Afro-Americans do, and they allow only the most

the

uses space like a

.

.

.

15

Jan Carew intimate friends, paramours, or close relatives to invade

it.

Afro-

Americans seem to invade one another's space with the greatest of Perhaps because they live in those American cities, the ease. .

.

.

space that their African ancestors brought with them just shrank.

What

Malcolm, a denizen of cities, still carrying a sense of space he inherited from his Grenadian mother. ... I don't know where he got his aristocracy of the spirit from either. But he's got it. You can't buy that or borrow it or pretend to have it, you've got to be born with it. Jesus Christ! but the man's lonely, eh! When he was talking to Lizaveta, I thought I saw a look a contradiction, though!

of pain and bewilderment flash across his eyes.

such sadness and longing that

I

thought, That's him! That's the

and enemies

had

"Crying? Malcolm? all

a

pang

in

was

my

a look of

heart,

and

I

that a lot of followers

alike never even catch a fleeting glimpse of!'

right then that he'd

"We

felt

Malcolm

It

I

was

sure

his nights of crying."

You must

man!" crying. I remember having

be joking,

have to have our night of

Amsterdam. I was about to go to Brussels the next day. It was wintertime, and I felt so blasted alone. I was always finding myself in strange cities, with strange people, and only the women, with their primordial understanding of how to humanize males of any race, color, or creed, prevented me from drowning in a limbo of madness. That night, I felt that I was at the end of my tether. I mine

in

cried

all

night long."

"Why the rass were you going to Brussels? Talk about a nomad, man, you're the ultimate nomad!" "Oh, I don't remember why I was going to Brussels. I was just drifting. But that night I cried from deep inside me all night long. Malcolm must've had his night of crying with his head on his wife's bosom, or when he was alone in a hotel room, or during his Mecca pilgrimage. Who knows?" "There are folks out there who want to steal his life "But there must be a part of him that wants to live; to see his children grow up, and to be part of a movement that evolves and matures that's what makes his secret nights of crying all the more

—

—

poignant."

GHOSTS

16

I\

OUR BLOOD

"Rass, man, the next thing you'll be doing

is

getting into your

crystal ball act."

"OK, I'll come down to earth again. What concerns me about Malcolm in this British arena is that, since his visits are so short, whole areas of our reality as immigrants and slums-of-the-empiredenizens are bound to elude him. Take the cultural scene in the midst of the snide, ugly, and stubborn British racism, there's still an explosion of art, literature, music, lifestyle, cuisine from the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. You can't always see

—

it

at a glance, but

it's

there burying itself into the flesh of Britain.

He'd need time to absorb and understand

Malcolm does have idea within

its

a

mind

like a giant

reach, he doesn't have

all

of this. Although

clam that snaps up every

enough time

to understand

and analyze what's going on here. But he is a quick learner. I told him that some of the Blacks here have a psychic impediment that prevents them from acknowledging the links binding them to their primary ancestral homelands, and because of this they become mentally crippled by self-hatred. 'A psychic impediment,' he'd repeated, moving his head from side to side and savoring the two words as if they were something tasty. 'I like that term. I must borrow it sometime.' If only he could buy more time! And he could, if he wanted to." "Man, it looks like friends and enemies alike are going to keep cheating the Brother of time for reflection and a spell of lotuseating ease that everybody needs occasionally like the bread of life."

and enemies keep swirling around him long create a whirlpool and drown him."

"If those friends

enough,

they'll

When we

home, Lizaveta refused to wake up and I had to carry her up two flights of stairs. Limp, fast asleep, and completely relaxed, she seemed to weigh at least half a ton. arrived

I

TWO He began

marrow

to fulfill the

was concealed

of his bones.

The next morning had

destiny that

I

— Popol

went

to see

agreed the night before.

Malcolm

He was

the

in

Vuli

we Mount

at seven-thirty as

staying at the

Royal Hotel off Marble Arch. When I entered the room, I was surprised to find him stricken with flu. A combination of a hectic and demanding round of activities being deported from France as a "security threat," plagued by reporters,

hounded down by

touch the

flesh at every turn

the curious

and by devotees eager

—plus the lousy English weather

to

in late

February had conspired to pass a debilitating virus on to him. The light filtering

in the

through pale blue curtains and the

room gave

his face a greenish pallor.

I

soft

yellow

tried to disguise

concern for his condition with an easy banter, and he in turn effort to

lights

my

made an

perk up and respond in a light and cheerful conversational

vein.

"You've got a nice view," I said as an opening gambit, "mews, cobblestones, windows, and chimney pots." "Oh, those things are 'mews.' Why do they call them that?" he asked, springing the question on me.

mind

that could take in an infinite

17

He had

number

a restless, inquiring

of details that might

Iti!?

GHOSTS

18

have seemed

them

trivial to

IN

OUR BLOOD

others but were important to

him

as he fitted

into the broader picture of British society. Besides,

London

quite obviously fascinated him.

"In the old days,"

and had

falcons

and

explained, "the rich and powerful kept

I

special quarters built for those highly prized birds

their keepers. Falcons

were more important than servants and

lackeys and our blackamoor ancestors " falcons mewed. Hence 'mews.'

"We

have cats

mewing's part of But he

this

moved

in the States that

who

mew—two-legged

Malcolm

their hustle,"

attended to them. The

attempt at joviality obviously took a great into the light

I

fall at

grin.

effort.

When

could see that the whites of his eyes were

veined with red, and occasionally the

were ready to

and

cats,

wide

said with a

lids

looked as though they

any moment. But valiantly he roused himself

had induced. He knew that ahead of him were interviews and speaking engagements, and he liked to from the torpor that the

flu

tailor his talks to suit his audience.

He

was, therefore, anxious to

As our conversation progressed, he summoned the energy to get up from his armchair and pace, slowly at first and then, quite unconsciously, more quickly. And realizing that he was wearing himself out, he'd stop abruptly, sit, and hug himself as if he was feeling cold. I had brought herbal tea in a flask and I drank a full cup before suggesting that he drink some. "You should push liquids for that flu," I counseled. "I'm OK," he said, barely managing a reassuring smile. I was hear about

life

in Britain.

ready to leave at that juncture. rest.

But

his eyes

nothing personal,

would

stay in

call

it

thought he should be

me

to stay,

my stomach

for long."

left

alone to

and he added,

my refusing the tea, but right now

perked up and asked, "Tell

you

I

appealed to

I

Then changing

me more about your

"It's

don't think

it

the subject he

paper.

Why

do

Magnet?"

"We wanted

the paper to attract people of color in Britain,

regardless of class or country of origin. There used to be a popular

penny dreadful magazine that had the same name, but our folks know nothing about it. Most of them are fairly recent arrivals." Malcolm, always quick to understand nuances, asked, "When

Jan Carew

you say 'people of

color,'

19

you mean Negroes, Indians,

Pakistanis,

Chinese, everyone of color?"

Malcolm. They've lumped us all together as 'niggers' Asians, Africans, West Indians, the lot. They compel us to unite whether we like it or not. Of course, throughout the empire, we had the same educational system inflicted on us and

"The English did us

a favor,

—

so

we

carry

much

the seams with

language

is

Britishness.

the fact that

soccer, rugby, differences,

of the same cultural baggage that's bursting at

its

and

we can

field

we

And

as important as the

play the same games, like cricket,

hockey. So despite enormous cultural

communicate

still

just

fairly easily

with one an-

other."

"And I can

you have, more or less, just "being able to talk the same language and

forecast that since

all

of

Malcolm said, play the same games will help for a while. But later on, they'll play the divide-and-conquer game on you, too. In the States, they do it with the Indians, the Asians, the Latinos, and even the West arrived,"

Indians."

He looked at me with a quizzical smile and said,

"Tell

me

him out." "Yes, old Rudolph, hmm! I could tell last night that you found him fascinating. He's a strange old bird, our Rudolph is. First he sees himself as a Black aristocrat, and then he's absolutely con-

about

this

Dunbar guy.

I

really couldn't figure

vinced that creative people like composers,

— superior beings

artists, writers, etc.,

"What about the Black ones?" Malcolm asked. "He thinks that the Black ones like himself are more

are

superior

than the others."

"That guy's really mixed up." "He is. Rudolph's case history would've made better reading than all those used by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks. The West Indies produced some types that are impossible

American cliches. Rudolph's the son nanny who worked for an English governor and his wife in Guyana. He grew up in a village that former slaves had bought from their master. You see, some of the slave owners had begun to pay wages to their slaves long before the emancipation act

to label with glib, Black/white

of a Guyanese

GHOSTS

20

was passed. So when

I\

01 R

BLOOD

was passed,

it

the ex-slaves pooled their

savings and, as the story goes, took wheelbarrows

pay for plantations that planters, too willing to

sell

who were now

full

of

money

to

broke, were only

to them."

"Sugar plantations?" Malcolm asked. "Yes,

when King Sugar

investors "I

and planters

fell

from

his throne, a lot of

bankers and

lost their shirts."

remember my mother

talking about cane fields,

and some-

when they were boiling the juice and how the village folk made moonshine. She was a West Indian, from Grenada." "Those sugarcane smells never leave you. Sometimes out of the blue I remember them, too." Malcolm brought me back to my Rudolph saga by asking, "So how did Brother Rudolph get from his village to London?" "While he was in elementary school, his mother paid for him to take music lessons, and his music teacher soon discovered that he was unusually gifted. He learned to play several instruments, but ended up playing the clarinet in the local militia band. Then his mother, with the help of friends and relatives, scraped up the money to send him to study at a Paris conservatory. It was while he was a student in Paris that the Associated Negro Press made him thing about the smell of sugar

.

.

.

European correspondent. When World War II broke out, Rudolph got a break to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in Albert Hail. He was also a war correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, and as if this was not enough, he was one of the founders of the League of Coloured Peoples, our British version of their

your

NAACP—

"Not my NAACP," Malcolm quipped. "OK, the NAACP. May I continue?" I asked with mock ence,

and he laughed and gestured with

you had time, we could have

visited

kinds of interesting things in service with the initials

"You must

at

home,

hands that

like

some of Adolf it

—

1

'Is

I

should. "If

Rudolph's apartment.

A.M. engraved on

be joking/

"As thev sav

it,

his

the God's truth.'

"

defer-

It

has

all

Hitler's silver

Jan Carew

"Well

how

in the

name

21

Allah—"

of

"According to Rudolph, he was the

first

Allied correspondent

bunker after the Soviets liberated it. His win special favors from the Soviet commandblackness made him ers. So he just collected some souvenirs from the bunker. He likes to cook, and when I visit him, he always prepares a West Indian bachelor's cook-up for me." "Bachelor's cook-up?" allowed to

"It's a

visit Hitler's

mixture of

shrimp, salted pig

He count

rice, split peas,

tails

—

held up a hand to stop

me

out of that pig

me

tail bit

coconut milk, beef, chicken,

in mid-sentence.

—

"You'd have

to

"Anyway, we use those monogrammed A.H. knives, forks, and spoons to dispatch our Guyanese meal, and Rudolph always chuckles and says, That old race-baiting bounder must be turning over in his grave.'

"

"I'd have enjoyed the

and

I

meal without the pork," Malcolm

said,

could see that he was savoring the incongruous picture of

Hitler turning over in his grave while

we

ate a

West Indian meal

using his silver service.

"There's more."

"Lay

it

on me. This

is

a tale to beat the band."

"After Berlin was divided into occupied zones, Rudolph per-

suaded American General Berlin

Hitler. It's best to get

when

Mark Clark

Symphony Orchestra

Rudolph

He

to invite

him

to conduct the

in its first concert after the fall of

talking about his Berlin triumph

you a dramatic, blow-by-blow account of what happened, and you can actually see him, impeccably tailored, Black and arrogant as hell, wielding his baton with complete assurance before musicians who had only recently been prostituting their art in the service of Hitler. He opened the concert with the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' and then he deliberately included works by Jewish composers." "So what happened afterwards? Why was he performing like a white man's trained dog at that reception?" "It's the usual sad tale of so many Blacks with talent. They used he's in his cups.

gives

GHOSTS

22

IN

OUR BLOOD

him, and then they cast him aside. That Berlin triumph and a concert in Paris were the high points of his career as a gifted

and a man. For decades now, he's been on a downhill, self-destructive slide. The sight of Rudolph performing a kind of poor man's Emperor Jones role makes me squirm inside, too. But what the hell! Perhaps I'm not secure enough to deal with something like this, that's too close for comfort. Maybe none of us maestro, an

activist,

are.

Malcolm was

silent, reflective,

eyes and said almost to himself,

home.

I

know a few of them.

It's

and withdrawn. He closed his "We've got our Rudolphs back

not easy being tolerant with them.

But I'm learning." I

thought he'd open up

now and

resurrect things that

buried deep in his psyche, but instead he said quietly,

were

"You know

something, you talk with that West Indian accent that carries echoes of

my

mother and her friends from home talking to one

another."

"Mine's a Guyanese accent. The Grenadian one

You've got to be born

that

Caribbean has

accent hasn't changed

much we end up emptying

though, spend so

much

own variety of English.

over the years.

Some

of us,

and we're left middle-class speech. The next

the content of our skulls,

—the British-born Blacks—

cents will be

its

time trying to shed our West Indian accents

brainless but with perfect British

generation

different.

in the region to be able to catch the different

accents. Every part of the

My

is

homegrown U.K.

will be different. Their ac-

ones, and then we'll have genuine

and yellow face." had obviously triggered a spate of disparate but intimate memories, and, all of a sudden, Malcolm seemed to peel off some of the protective layers and to peer into a troubled past when he confessed, "I used to like to hear my mother talk when I was growing up. After all the years she spent in Canada and British-speak in black, brown,

The Rudolph

story

And, boy-oh-boy! When she was angry she could shape the words like bullets and shoot them at you." Looking straight ahead as though I were no longer there, he added, "I hated seeing my mother working night and day like she the States, she never lost that accent.

Jan Caren did. After

my

father

23

was murdered, she had nine mouths

to feed,

and she had to do it all by herself. It's only now that I can understand what a terrible life she lived. We all had to pitch in, but night and day, day and night ... I she did most of the toiling .

used to daydream that give her

all

.

when

.

I

grew up

the things she never had.

seeing her slaving day after day,

made

her

life

thought of

I

I'd

become

And now

my

my

and

realize, too, that

began to hate the system that

one of endless drudgery, so what

mother out of

I

a lawyer

I

did

mind, and lock

it

was shut

the

away." And

then, having revealed a glimpse of the tender recesses of his heart,

he suddenly turned, looked at me, and asked matter-of-factly,

"What was your mother

like?"

"She was the youngest daughter of a said,

knowing

that while

I

talked about

village schoolmaster,"

my mother he'd

I

have time

had aroused. "Her mother could've crossed the color and caste line if she wanted to. I remember my mother telling me that when her mother visited Georgetown without husband and children, everyone assumed that she was a white woman and treated her with extra deference. But when husband and children accompanied her, the reverse was true the same folks who'd deferred to her when she was alone went out of their way to be rude, and she'd declare, 'If looks could've killed, their malicious glances would've wiped my mother to assuage the anguish that

remembering

his

—

off the face of the earth!'

"

"Funny how these stories are the same everywhere!" he said, "My mother could've passed for white, too, and you should've seen the evil looks the whites shot at her

And once

she

was with

bait for their lechery.

make

us, those

when

she traveled with us.

rednecks thought she was prime

But she had a sharp tongue, and she could

those lechers back off right away."

"Malcolm, they've quoted you as having said that you hate every in your veins, that your grandmother was raped by a white man." "That was a political statement. That was the line Elijah drop of white blood

Muhammad laid down, and as one of his ministers, I echoed it. That was when I was in a mental straitjacket. But I've broken out of

GHOSTS

24 it

IN

01 R

BLOOD

and I'm no longer mouthing someone else's lines. I'm speaking my own voice now." I wanted to pursue this question of how he perceived black/white

with

relations since his break with the Black

Muslims, so playing

devil's

what do you say we take this black/white issue to a logical conclusion? If every Negro of mixed blood was a rape-child, then you would've needed millions upon millions of white rapists to accomplish this grisly task of using advocate,

I

asked, "But just for the hell of

it,

race to assert power. They'd have been so busy with those mass rapes, they wouldn't have

had time to oppress

trade and scour the seas looking for more what about our women? Didn't any of them

we

never hear about the Black

the brothers

matter

how

who

women who

it

run plantations,

riches to plunder. fight

back?

Or

is it

And that

fought back and about

died fighting to defend them?

occasional

us,

And

wasn't there, no

was, a genuine love between some of those

And when our own men treated them badly, our women turn to men of another race who treated

interracial couples?

didn't some of them with more consideration? Look,

I've

got enough mixed blood

in my family to make the heads of racists spin. One relative of mine who was an officer in the Royal Air Force was shot down over Germany during World War II. The Germans captured him and

before he

was

sent to a prisoner-of-war

camp, they asked him what

race he was. So he said to his Nazi interrogators, 'Since you're specialists

on

so-called racial purity,

you work

it

out: I'm a mixture

of African, Carib, Portuguese Jew, Highland Scot, German, yes, even

some German, Irish, and French.' The Germans solved the problem " by listing him as 'race unknown.' Malcolm threw up his hands, laughing, and conceded, "OK, you've made your point. But right now I see 'Black' and 'white' as political and ideological terms. I probably have just as much mixed blood as you do, but politically and ideologically we're both Black. We've got to be. The white racists in America don't bother to they differentiate between shades of black, brown, or yellow color us black regardless of skin tones. African brothers and sisters, too, accept us as one of them when we take sides with them

—

in their liberation struggles.

But when

we

act white, they call us

Jan Carew white even

if

we're black as

them

whites

better than standing side

is

sunlight.

them

It's

dor told

me

how

a joke

devils. Well,

while

I

shadow

of the

by side with Black folk

in the

right, that

being in the

the whites keep accusing

was

in Africa, a

me

of calling

savvy Chinese ambassa-

that the Chinese man-in-the-street calls whites 'white

and Blacks who

devils'

is

acting white, we're sending

tar. In

signals to

that white

25

act white 'black-white devils.' That's

ideology at the grassroots for you!

And as

for our

women resisting,

I'm just beginning to explore that hidden subject, and I've a long

way

to go. But beginning with those early

still

got

memories of

my

and what I'm finding out is changing the way I see the world." After one of those meaningful pauses that told me his restless mind was ranging across a host of troubled thoughts, he continued, "I wonder how my life would've turned out if I'd been born in the West Indies and my mother had brought me here to Britain when I was thirteen." Slumped in an armchair with shoulders hunched and arms hugging his chest, he looked pale and vulnerable and defeated. And mother,

I

I've started to dig deeper,

thought once again that the confident, charismatic Malcolm

who

had come to the reception at the Commonwealth Institute last night had been transformed by a flu virus and a bout of Hamletism into a being full of doubt and self-pity. If only those who idolized him or who denounced him as a prophet of violence could have seen him now!

"Why thirteen?" "That's

I

asked, intrigued.

when I was farmed out to

just finished the eighth grade.

foster parents in

A white probate

lated things so that he could steal our

Michigan.

I'd

judge had manipu-

house and land and hand

them over to his relatives, and on top of that, having pushed my mother until she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown from overwork,

this so-called

white upholder of the law forced her to

sign herself into a mental hospital.

None

of us

was old enough

prevent the breakup and scattering of our family. Wilfred, oldest brother,

was

still

closing his eyes for a I

in his teens,"

he said, removing his glasses,

moment, and pinching

waited for him to continue but

to

my

when he

the bridge of his nose.

didn't,

I

could see that his

GHOSTS

26 being wrenched

away from

IN

a

OIR BLOOD

widowed mother and

family and

handed over to foster parents by a venal judge and impersonal state was perhaps one of the most painful occurrences of his life. "First of all, what you'd have needed to survive here in the mother country was good parents, luck, solidarity with the West Indian community plus those folks in the host community who were sympathetic to our cause," I said. officials

—

"OK, let's say that I had a single parent a mother who was a widow and that she was ambitious and determined to see that her

—

children got a solid education; and

we were I

'well

brought up and not

—

as she

just

would

often say

dragged up.'

—that

'

got into the swing of this make-believe scenario and asked,

"How many children? And what kind of background

come Worker? Peasant? And how old would she have been? And did she grow up Lower middle

from

in

in the

country or in the city? All these things matter."

"Well,

Grenada? Middle

let's

class?

did she

class?

say she had one foot in the middle class and the other

grew up in the country until she and moved to the city; that she'd married my father when she was nineteen, and he too had one foot in and the other out of the middle class; that he had a good basic schooling and was handy as a builder, a carpenter, a farmer, and an odd-job man; and that by the time she was thirty-six she had seven children by him but was widowed when he died in an accident." He paused and tilted his head to one side thoughtfully. "Let's say, too, that she was an orphan, and the folks who brought her up in Grenada hadn't spared the rod and spoiled the child." "OK, so she was a strict West Indian mother, like all respectable mothers were in her time. Her strictness was her way of ensuring that no matter what happened to her, her children would survive as a family. The whole family, therefore, would have migrated mother and seven children. But let's not jump the gun, because your mother was almost certain to have had a relative or a close friend who had already migrated to Britain." "OK, an uncle, we had several uncles, and my mother named all of her sons after them. I was named after an uncle who emigrated in respectable poverty; that she

was

ten

27

Jan Carew

amused look

to Canada," he said, with an

in his eyes as

he gently

stroked his beard. "All right,"

I

continued, "let's transfer this Uncle

Britain, and, true to tradition,

Malcolm

to

he would've been a maternal uncle.

and Carib ancestors before and aunts are the only true blood relatives, since the mother's the only proven and verifiable custodian of the family lineage. As for the father, well! One can

Some West

them,

still

Indians, like their African

believe that maternal uncles

never be absolutely certain

who

the father

is.

So Uncle Malcolm

would've assured her that he'd meet her when the boat-train

and she and the children could stay with him. He would even have helped her with the passage money. Once all of that was settled, she'd have set out on a crowded, cockroach-ridden and rat-infested Italian passenger ship. The owners of those ships made arrived,

a fortune running an Atlantic slave trade in reverse

—ferrying

immigrants from the West Indies to Britain. Our folk came in droves, lured by the promise of jobs and social welfare benefits,

both of which were in very short supply at home. So having gathered together prized belongings, your mother would've

packed them

down with

in a

stand-up family trunk that almost knocked you

the smell of mothballs

when

it

was opened. There

would have been a hectic period of preparation when your mother and sundry friends and neighbors made new outfits for the travelers, the Singer

machines humming

late into the night.

Then,

made Your mama and her brood, with a delegation of friends and neighbors seeing them off, would then have set out on a long and cramped Atlantic crossing. They copying

styles

from pictures

in

magazines, they'd have

overcoats for everyone out of blankets.

would've been served stingy and indifferent meals, and when the Atlantic began to heave

and

roll,

gone to the sharks following lesson your

a lot of that

in the ship's

bad food would've

wake.

An

important

mother would've learned on that voyage was this: West

Indians from distant places like British Honduras, Jamaica,

Guyana, and the Bahamas were more often than not along with than fellow Grenadians.

West Indians took place on those

A kind

easier to get

of forced federation of

ships while the immigrants were

GHOSTS

28

packed ten or more to

IN

01 R BLOOD

a cabin. In spite of the

cramped

quarters,

though, your mother would've enjoyed a certain kind of freedom that she'd never

—freedom from gossip and the neighbors — and she'd have had time to

known

malicious scrutiny of

at

home

and relax while newfound 'aunts' helped to look if they were their own. So mother and children would've arrived in Genoa after a two-week-long voyage during which new and lasting friendships were forged." "Our folks have done a lot of migrating," Malcolm said ruefully. "Some of it was forced, but a whole lot of it was just moving from place to place to stay alive." He leaned forward thoughtfully and pressed a forefinger against his temple. This gesture, so characteristic of him, always reminded me of the Dutch boy who'd pushed his finger into a hole in the dike to hold back the sea. herself to think

after her children as

"That finger of his,"

I

told myself, "is holding back an avalanche

of secret thoughts, presentiments, forebodings, and ideas."

I

con-

tinued creating our make-believe scenario: "The Italian ship-

owners used Genoa because those rundown passenger vessels wouldn't have passed inspection at an English port. And as for mother and children, long after their feet had touched dry land, they'd have

felt

as

though they were standing

still

while the sky and

and below them. Then you and the others would've been herded onto a train between a gauntlet of

the earth were heaving above

and curious onlookers. You see, the only other times in which those gawking European onlookers had seen Black, brown, and yellow folk in large numbers on their shores was when they had come as soldiers, sailors, airmen in short, as cannon fodder for the white man's wars. So those curious white spectators would've stared and stared and felt somewhat relieved that these invading black hordes folk from the British West Indies whom carabinieri

—

—

President Roosevelt had referred to as 'two million headaches'

someone else's." was aroused, he could listen with His limbs would relax, but his eyes never left you

were not going to be

When Malcolm's whole being. a moment.

their neighbors, but

interest

his

for

29

Jan Carew

"So we're in Genoa now. What next?" he asked, removing his spectacles and leaning forward. Encouraged by his attentiveness, I continued, "As that slow train

from Genoa pulled out, packages of food would've literally been thrown at the travelers. And a host of Black folk, their faces pressed against train windows, would've caught fleeting glimpses of European cities and countrysides rushing past them. And at night, they would've seen galaxies of

city lights,

shining like millions of

and keeping the darkness at bay. What would've impressed the immigrants most of all, though, was not the buildings, the lights, the neat farms and fields and the fancy structures, but the sight of white men and women working as porters, railway workers, farmhands, and hucksters something they'd never befireflies

—

fore seen in their lives.

You

see, in the

Caribbean, the British

it was a mortal sin for Thousands of pictures, images, and a host of myths had bombarded our colonized minds as soon as we left the cradle and started growing up, impressing upon us that black, brown, or yellow skin color forever equals manual labor and racial inferiority." Malcolm furrowed his brow, and there was a slightly puzzled expression on his face. "As I told you before, my mother could've passed for white, but she grew up with Caribs and Negroes, and she chose to be Black, and a Garveyite," he repeated.

proconsuls had tricked us into believing that

white people to

soil

their fair hands.

"In our Caribbean, your mother's the exception that proves the rule,"

I

said.

"How come?" "In our neck of the woods, barriers of class and color were

sometimes quietly lowered. black and

still

You

could be black as the night

be regarded as a backraman

if

you had enough

is

filthy

lucre."

"A backraman}" "A person whose explained.

wealth and status whitens him or her,"

I

GHOSTS

30

"You can buy your way up U.S.A., but

if

Brother, you

OUR BLOOD

IN

to the fringes of whiteness in the

you're Black, no matter still

how much money you

have to navigate your way around as

if

have,

you were

in a minefield."

"If you're white

and poor

in

our neck of the woods, on the other

hand, the colonial officialdom does a very deft switch and

you

as 'Other.'

classifies

"

" 'Other'?" Malcolm asked. " 'Other' simply means that poor whites have been expelled

from the white race and shoved into the ranks of the Black, brown, and yellow. Racial democracy at the bottom! Poverty neutralizing whiteness. That's our Caribbean scene. And that's why Yankee tourists are often impressed or in

some

when

cases horrified, depending

on poor in the Caribbean and Latin American blond, blue-eyed men, women, and children wallowing freely at the bottom with Black, brown, yellow, quadroon, octoroon, or what-have-you the eye of the beholder,

they see the racially integrated

—

folks."

Malcolm shook

up with his fist, declared, "In the U.S.A., the powers that be keep the poor whites happy by telling them that they might be poor, dumb, and backward, but an

his

head and, propping

illiterate

his chin

white sharecropper

is still

superior to a

Negro no matter how high and mighty this Negro might think he is. The Negro could be a priest, a professor with a Ph.D., a politician, or a Pullman porter, and it wouldn't make any difference." He laughed his boyish laugh and his eyes danced with an impish delight as he sat back to enjoy his that sometimes, depending

hang limply

when he

at his side

and

on

his

joke.

I

mood, he would

noticed then let his

stretch his long legs in front of him.

arms

And

was one of those very tall with an adolescent awkwardness

did this, you realized that he

people whose limbs are afflicted of their

all

own

lives.

"Let's get back to the scene

where

my mother and

her seven kids

are emigrating to Britain," he said. I

sat

back and continued:

"The worst part of

that Genoa-Calais-London trip

—crossing

Jan Carew the English Channel

31

—was yet to come, man. After a night and a

day in coffined spaces on a slow train with locked doors and windows, your mama, you, your brothers and sisters, along with the other immigrants, would've finally been disgorged onto a

Channel steamer. This

last

phase of the journey had

its

of horrors waiting for you. At the height of the

own brand

West Indian

immigrant onrush, the folks always seemed to arrive

Channel ports when

at

the

and high winds, sometimes blowing with hurricane force, churned up mountainous seas. But let's track back a bit and talk about how, at the beginning of this final ordeal, those travelers from the sun would've felt the first bite of cold when they left the train at Calais or Boulogne and hurried to the third-class deck of the Channel steamer. The first cold winds would've licked their noses, cheeks, and fingers like frozen tongues and bitten them like cold, sharp teeth of iron, and with every breath they took, they'd have felt as if they were breathing in razor blades. Then, as soon as the ship got under way, those winds would've begun to howl and moan like dogs grieving for drowned owners; and the ship, plowing and shivering its way through walls of water, would have made them feel as if they were standing on a deck that could at any moment remove itself from under them. Added to stale food,

squalls, rainstorms,

all this,

the smells of bilge water, fresh paint,

and body odors sent stinking vapors to the brain and

unleashed a plague of seasickness. The folks would then begin to

were awash and and drink, bile, and stomach juices. Those odors permeating the closed and crowded lounge would become fetid, heavy, and unbearable and even when one of the braver souls opened the door to rush on deck and lean over the rails, the clean sea air would refuse to mingle with the odious retch

and vomit

their guts out, until the decks

slippery with half-digested food

stench of that third-class limbo.

So that journey to Britain

would've forced you and your family to

relive the

journey that

African ancestors had taken in the opposite direction centuries ago.

"Your first stop in London would've been under the sooty domes of Waterloo Station. Suddenly that station would be

GHOSTS

32

festooned with Black faces

IN

OUR BLOOD

—immigrants

in tropical dress

with

beach towels around necks and shoulders, babies wrapped

in

men and

everything that could be fished out of mothballed trunks,

women

walking to rhythms that were born when their bare feet had touched warm and welcoming surfaces. And the cold, often bewildered stares of the British hosts would freeze them to the bone more cruelly than the weather did. But on the fringes of the crowd of newcomers would always be hustlers waiting to prey on lonely and lost souls who had no one to meet them. But your Uncle Malcolm would have been there with overcoats and blankets to wrap around his never-see-come-to-see relatives and warm them with the glow of his pleasure at seeing them. That's how you and

your family would've come to Britain, Brother-man, and once you

were crowded into

cramped

his

would've explained to your

quarters, old Uncle

Malcolm

mama that she could apply for welfare

and, after the children were registered in schools, begin looking for a job."

"She'd have hated living on welfare," Malcolm said emphatically.

"Then she would've

schools very quickly and started a worker

hospital or as

been highly

literate,

your brothers, and

settled you,

work

sisters in

as a nurse's aide in a

in a factory. She,

most

likely,

would've

but without certificates that they recognized

in

the mother country, she would've been unable to get a clerical job.

Newfound

friends would've persuaded her that a factory job

her best bet; and someone that hired

learned her

West first

Indians.

would even have taken her So working in a factory,

was

to a factory

she'd have

lessons in survival in a highly industrialized

and

racist society."

"And what about school would

I

schools?" Malcolm asked.

"What kind

of

have gone to?"

modern everywhere you went the

"You'd have gone Black teenager,

to a secondary

school. police

And

as a tall

would have

stopped you and badgered you and goaded you into getting arrested

and charged. And

if

you were

bright, racist teachers

have done everything possible to make you

feel

dumb and

would

inferior.

Jan Carew

33

you of all people surely would have done, they'd have seen to it that you were shoved down to the lowest rung of the achievement ladder so that you could join the

And when you

protested, as

other so-called maladjusted colored students."

"Wouldn't have been any

different

from the U.S.A. then," he

said with a good-natured chuckle. But

somehow

this didn't suc-

ceed in dispelling the somber thoughts that our make-believe scenario had inspired. For Black folk everywhere in the diaspora

must be a land somewhere over the

like to believe that there

horizon where Black people can tion,

and

But

I

had

who its

I

list.

added, "After raging against the hurts inflicted upon

this racist society,

you might

also have

become

the leader

could have united the Black community in Britain to fight for

rights."

and

just scratched Britain off the

could not end our make-believe scenario on a note of

I

despair, so

you by

without fear of discrimina-

live

I

He seemed to

be lost in a reverie and did not comment,

continued, "Racism wears different masks in different places

at different times,

but

when

the

mask

malevolent face of exploitation and greed

"But your experience was with an ironic smile, and

different,

when our

is is

torn away, the same

exposed."

wasn't it?" Malcolm asked

eyes

made

four, his gaze

was

and searching. He had lost interest in our make-believe and wanted to probe other complexities of Black life in Britain. He was very shrewd and knew that the dismal immigration scenario I had just painted for him was by no means the only one in the drama of Black migration. "Yes, my life was different," I acknowledged. "I was a middleclass colonial Negro from Guyana. But what happened was that, like Nkrumah, I had worked and studied in the United States before I came here, and the racism in America tore off my mask. You see, direct

exercise

Black Americans taught

me

the kind of racial loyalty that

we

don't

West Indies and Africa. Besides, the British are pretty making you believe that since the white British male is the most 'superior' being on earth, then some of that 'superiority' rubs off on their Black, brown, and yellow lackeys, who in turn can claim

have

in the

clever at

to be top dogs in the colonial-lackey limbo world of

'many dogs and

GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD

34 few bones.' The

have more experience than the Yanks

British

in

finding the right boreholes into the minds of their colonial subjects.

The Yanks

They tell you that their white Anglo-Saxon males are 'superior' and if you don't acknowledge it, they're ready to club you to the ground, shoot you, tar and feather and lynch you, deny you jobs, decent housing, and even medical attention if you're bleeding to death and a Black doctor or a Black hospital isn't nearby. It isn't that their racism doesn't have its own brand of subtleties and are cruder.

warts or that their Negroes are a special breed, but Black Americans

had

different challenges to face

was abolished

Slavery

profitable.

Economics and

abolitionists,

cotton

was

in the

brought

it

and

West

Indies in 1832.

It

were

different.

had ceased

to be

slave resistance, not the eloquence of

to an end. Meanwhile, in the United States,

and the planter

king,

their responses

from the blood, sweat, and

was wringing obscene

class

profits

tears of slave labor, so slavery clung to

the South like a malignancy

—

and

it

took the

killing spree of a Civil

War to remove it

"Are you a Marxist?" Malcolm broke

in.

He had

a

way

of

springing unexpected questions.

"Aren't you?"

I

shot back.

"Answer my question and I'll answer yours," he countered. "I'll answer by telling you a story. Recently, a countryman of mine, a Black vicar of Bray,

who

looks like a weasel and acts like

one, went to an English lord and told

him

that

I

was

a

Communist;

and this English aristocrat laughed in his face and said, 'Which self-respecting Black

himself told tell

man

me about

it.

wouldn't be a Communist?' That lord

There are some white people

you with malice about the

quislings

who come

who

like to

to lick their

boots."

"You

still

haven't answered

quizzical twist to his

"I'm a

my

mouth and

a

question," tilt

socialist, a Pan-Africanist, a

Malcolm

said with a

of the head.

Black Marxist, a nationalist

who believes in the cultural unity of the Black world based on our common resistance to white racism. And I'm an off again on again atheist,

because the secret and forbidden

polyglot races and cultures in

spirit

world to which the

my village introduced me still lives in

Jan Carew

my

imagination and

my

psyche and nourishes

paint. I'm all of these things rolled into

"You

left

35

one

—

me when

I

write or

out something," he said, cutting in again.

"What's that?"

"That you're married to an English woman, that you have three English stepchildren

"And one "And one

of

—

my own,"

of your

I

added.

own," he repeated.

"But this 'married to a white woman' business is a peculiarly American obsession." "American and South African," he corrected. "But I found out during my travels that it wasn't such a big deal to most folk."

"What?" mean, peeping into bedrooms to find out the color of couples is a sick American pastime." He turned to me with a slight of embarrassment and asked, "How did you put it? Something

"I

bed

in air

about Black and white conversation below the waist?"

"Ah,

yes,

I

said that conversation

below the waist

is

easier

and

more pervasive in Britain and Europe, but I also said that it doesn't make the slightest difference to the institutionalized racism in this neck of the woods. Racism isn't resolved in bed no matter who's sleeping with "I agree.

It

whom." should be a personal and private

affair,

but

when you

walk arm in arm out your front door, it becomes a political matter. Besides, what about our Black women who are left on the shelf?" "The chaps here say that while they're here they have to live off the land, since they can't afford the fare to go searching for Black

women

They say that no matter what color the wife is, cut off from a homeland forever the way they are, the woman they share life with, who bears their children and hers she then becomes their country." "The woman, white, brown, yellow, or black, is their 'country,' that's a new one on me," Malcolm said, shaking his head and creasing his brow in bewilderment. I brought the conversation back to the subject of where he stood on questions of socialism and Marxism. "I told you about my overseas.

—

—

GHOSTS

36

I\

01 R

BLOOD

potpourri of socialism, Marxism, etcetera, so what about you,

Malcolm?" "I'm a Muslim and a revolutionary, and I'm learning more and more about political theories as the months go by. The only Marxist group in America that offered me a platform was the Socialist Workers party. I respect them and they respect me. The Communists have nixed me, gone out of the way to attack me that is, with the exception of the Cuban Communists. If a mixture of nationalism and Marxism makes the Cubans fight the way they do and makes the Vietnamese stand up so resolutely to the might of America and its European and other lapdogs, then there must be something to it. But my Organization of African American Unity is based in Harlem and we've got to learn to creep before we walk, and walk before we run." He paused and added, "But the chances .

are that they will get

me

the

way

they got

Lumumba

.

.

before he

reached the running stage."

Malcolm had once again

retreated deep within himself.

I

tried to

my macabre fantasies of his being shot, blown to pieces with bomb, mangled in a car crash all of this before he had time to explore the social and political theories that would give shape, structure, and continuity to his OAAU. But how gentle he was when he was pensive! And yet a part of him was forever alert. He was a reincarnated Hareward-the-Wake-or- Watchful, I thought. Hareward was an Anglo-Saxon freedom fighter about whom I'd read in the Royal Reader when I was a boy. He had fought ignore

—

a

valiantly against the

Norman

invaders.

My colonial education had

me much about English and European history but nothing of my own, and so now I instinctively dipped into a complex memory pool to match white heroes and heroines who had died taught

long ago with living Black ones, like Martin Luther King, of course,

meant

was not

the intention of

to revere those white heroes

my

Round

Table. But

when

it

came

colonial educators.

and heroines, such

ward, Boadicea, the leader of the Iceni

Jr.

This, I

was

as Hare-

or King Arthur of the and heroines of color, I Gunga Din and Malinche,

tribe,

to heroes

was induced to admire quislings like that Mexican Indian mistress of Cortes. From elementary school

^H

Jan Carew

37

onward, educators taught children of color

in

the empire to

identify with Richard the Lion-Hearted, John and Sebastian

Cabot, Martin Frobisher, first

Sir

Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, the

English slave trader, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth

I,

the Virgin

and Robin Hood and his merry men although not because Robin took from the rich and gave to the poor, but because he was co-opted by the king and became a knight and betrayed the partisans who had fought side by side with him in Sherwood Forest. So Black children of the colonial world identified with the victors and imagined themselves becoming intrepid explorers, buccaneers, slave traders, missionaries, and white "civilizers of savages." To compound the problem of alienation, the ultimate symbols of evil the bad man, the mindless

Queen who was no

virgin, Clive of India,

—

female, the half-breed, the

— savage — are

always symbolized by

Negroes, Amerindians, coolies, and other Kiplingesque "lesser breeds beyond the law."

somehow, Boadicea. She was But,

I

had always

felt

a sneaking

the leader of a "tribe,"

my head, were my African ancestors.

I

and

sympathy

so, they

for

dinned into

could not therefore envision

her being anything like the bigoted and nondescript wives and

daughters of the British proconsuls in Guyana. Suetonius Paulinus, the

female warriors

command,

I

the victors.

Roman

who were

general,

fighting side by side under Boadicea's

instinctively identified I

When I read of how

had crushed the male and

tried to picture the

with the vanquished, not with

dead

Iceni

men and women,

tall grass and under verging pang of pity for the ones who surrendered the old folks, the women and children all of whom were rounded up at spearpoint and herded together like animals to be shipped off into slavery. As for the brave Boadicea, I was sure that she was left with no choice but to commit suicide, shouting defiance at her

scattered like tacoubas across fields of trees;

and

felt

I

—

a

—

Roman

enemies before she died.

"Would Malcolm ever have to myself,

and

my mind went

follow in their footsteps?"

I

asked

blank, leaving the question unan-

swered.

Looking

at

him

closely,

I

couldn't help thinking that

away from

GHOSTS

38 the limelight friend.

that he

and

01 R

BLOOD

in the privacy of this hotel

room, he

really

needed a

Although we'd only known each other a short time, I was sure

had come to

trust

under the circumstances. sick

I\

I

me

as far as he

would have

trusted

anyone

also thought that during this spell of being

and vulnerable he wanted, more than anything

else,

not only to

be at ease but also to be able to trust someone, even for a short while.

However, an incident occurred that made he was being hounded by what

my

it

clear to

me

that because

mother would have described

her biblical language as "the powers and principalities," there point beyond which

Forgetting earlier

how

Malcolm

trusted

was

in

a

no one.

he had refused the herbal tea I'd offered him

and seeing that he was

still

fighting not to give in to the flu,

him a Contac capsule from a bottle I always carried in my briefcase. Once again he thanked me politely, but this time he took the capsule from me and put it on a bedside stand. I realized the moment I handed it to him that it was not the wisest thing to have done. But having set the capsule aside, he sat opposite me and I

offered

smiled in the friendliest possible fashion. For the rest of

my

visit,

though, that red and white capsule sat on the bedside stand, catching

my eye

reprovingly every time

I

looked

in its direction.

"I'm a marked man," he explained somberly. The smile had

and after a long and awkward silence he continued, "They've marked me down for death. I'm living like a man who's already dead." Without warning, I sang out, "Let us sit upon the ground and tell faded from his

lips,

old stories of the death of kings!"

"Another one of your quotes," Malcolm head's a library

full

said.

"Man, your

of quotes."

"This one came from nowhere,"

I

confessed. "I wanted to

discuss something else with you, but this Shakespearean passage just slipped out."

ambiguous exchange any further because it was obvious that he was eager to unburden himself of some of the troubling concerns that were uppermost in his mind. "They? Who's this 'they' hounding you down?" I asked trying to I

Sffl£^

didn't pursue this

Jan Carew

push him closer to

39

his "night of crying" so that he'd

open up and

some of the pain might drain out of his heart. "I used to think it was the Muslims, but more and more it's dawning on me that the forces tracking me down are more powerful than Elijah's hit men. After what happened in Egypt and France I quit saying that it was the Muslims alone who were after me," he

said,

"Malcolm,

looking away. in

Guyana we

sometimes no matter you,

Mantop

your

full

I

call death's

messenger Mantop, and

how many assassins are out there trying to get

cuts his sly

mongoose eye on them and

lets

you

live

four score and ten years."

"You don't know the people who are after me. I know them, and know the people who are manipulating them. Nothing short of

my

how I When I shook my head

death will satisfy that combination. Did you read about

was nearly poisoned

in

Cairo?" he asked.

was having dinner at the Nile Hilton with a friend named Milton Henry and a group of others, when two things happened simultaneously. I felt a pain in my stomach and, in a flash, I realized that I'd seen the waiter who'd served me before. He looked South American, and I'd seen him in New York. The poison bit into me like teeth. It was strong stuff. They rushed me to the hospital just in time to pump the stuff out of my stomach. The doctor told Milton that there was a toxic substance in my food. no, he recounted, "I

When

the Egyptians

who were

with

me looked for the waiter who know that our Muslims don't

had served me, he had vanished. I have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network." Before I could question him further, he changed the subject abruptly. Perhaps the memory of this event was still too painful for him to dwell on it for long. "It

seems incredible," he

of countries in Africa

said,

"but

I

actually visited a

Tanganyika, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia. ing

up

I

never dreamed of doing

everywhere ers

and

I

this.

When I was

There's something

went on that continent, though

sisters

whole

lot

—Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zanzibar, I

grow-

noticed

—our African broth-

have eyes that look further than the color of your

GHOSTS

40

01 R BLOOD

IN

your eyes, or the kind of nap you have on your head. They look straight into your heart. And what good manners they have! skin,

Africans and Chinese are the most polite folk I've ever met.

I

guess

on the way to America we had to dump some of those good manners in the Atlantic ditch. If a slave master's calling you names, shouting at you all the time, putting you in chains and whipping you, then you get accustomed to aggression, not polite conversation. So after four hundred years the good manners of our ancestors were bound to be watered down." that

He

got up with

some

effort

and began to pace up and down

again.

"But

me more about your

tell

broken thread of

Magnet

paper," he asked, picking up the

and holding up the copy of

his earlier inquiry

that I'd given

him the night

before. "I've just seen this

issue."

"That's the only one so

almost ready to go to press.

far. It's a

weekly, and the next issue's

Do you know, your entire debate at the

Oxford Union was never broadcast or published. Because of American pressure, no doubt, they've buried it somewhere. I'll try and get hold of it and publish every word of it in Magnet." "They promised me copies of the tape and the film, but," he said with a knowing smile, "looks like those tapes got lost in the mail." "Does this kind of thing happen often?" I asked, knowing that it did.

—

"Sometimes things get through. I suspect and, mind you, I have no proof that there are brothers and sisters at the post office who

—

know my name, bypass the censors, and slip things through every now and then. And talking about the Oxford Union, do you know Tony Abrahams?" "Yes, I know Tony about him,"

I

said.

"You

explained,

call

well. He's got a kind of

When Malcolm it

'feistiness'

Jamaican facetiness

looked a

bit

bewildered,

but in the West Indies,

we

I

say

As president of the Oxford Union, Tony didn't mind twisting the British lion's tail a bit when he invited you to take part in the Oxford Union debate a few months ago." 'facetiness.'

Jan Carew

"He really stirred things up

at

41

Oxford, didn't he?" Malcolm said

with a wicked smile.

"Tony? No, the two of you did. He opened the door, and you walked in and took over. But Tony wasn't the first West Indian president of the Oxford Union. The first one was a Barbadian named Cameron Tudor. He was elected president of the Union at the height of World War II. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda

who had some kind of sneaking reverence for Oxford, denounced Tudor as 'a slave boy in Oxonian robes.' And that old racist was on the verge of apoplexy as he cussed the British out for being so 'decadent.' It is curious how the racism that Hitler and minister,

Goebbels both preached and practiced was profoundly influenced

by colonial ideologues like the Englishman Austen Chamberlain and the Frenchman Gobineau. Hitler read and lapped up their racist ideas and these were spewed out in his Mein Kampf. Before Chamberlain became colonial secretary at the beginning of the twentieth century, British proconsuls posted to the Gold Coast used to be encouraged to marry African women highborn women, of course, like the daughters of chiefs, princelings, and obas. This encouraged the reluctant proconsuls to stay for long periods, in spite of the fact that the Gold Coast was known as the 'white man's grave' because of yellow fever. I suspect that even more than the yellow fever, those proconsuls drank too much alcohol, dressed in the wrong kind of clothes, and ate the wrong

—

kind of food."

"Our southern from the

start,"

crackers wrote that racist prohibition into law

he interjected.

"Ghanaian nationalists now say that Austen Chamberlain's was a blessing in disguise, because the offspring of a large Cape Coast and Accra mulatto elite would have blocked

prohibition

independence for decades."

"House Negroes," Malcolm muttered. "Yes, they would have been classical house Negroes." "We have our fair share of them Creoles who imitate white

—

folks,

and when the white folks look up and

see mirror

images of

GHOSTS

42

themselves, they hate

it

IN

01 R BLOOD

and they take

imitators with a special hatred,"

it

Malcolm

out on those Creole said.

Then he leaned

forward, and with one of his swift leaps to another topic he asked,

"Look, Jan, could you send me a book list? I'd like to read up on some of the things you talk about. Send it to the address in New

York

that

I

gave you."

"All right, but

also send

I'll

you books from time to time,"

I

promised. "I'd appreciate that, Jan, really appreciate it."

"Wasn't

it

you who

seemed pleased that

Muhammad

started

I'd

touched on

Speaks}"

this topic

I

asked.

He

and he answered

immediately.

"Yes,

I

convinced Elijah

Muhammad

was necesWhat do you think

that the paper

sary as a unifying tool and an educational tool.

of it?"

"You want my candid opinion?" "Yes." "Its

coverage of Third World news

a cudgel for Black peoples in

world

as,

is

tremendous, and

America and elsewhere

it

took up

in the

Black

perhaps, no other major Black journal has done before,

or tail of the mumbo jumbo upon readers in every issue." "Don't be fooled," Malcolm warned. "It might look like mumbo jumbo to you, but it's a language that his followers understand. That's what makes him dangerous." There was an awkward silence which I broke by saying, "You wouldn't believe how Magnet came into being." "Try me," he said, leaning forward and giving me his undivided

but

I

can't for the

that Elijah

me make head

of

life

Muhammad

inflicts

attention.

when

"It all started

three Jamaican brothers

came

to

me and said

that they were about to start a paper for the Black people in Britain,

and they wanted me to

edit

it.

They had grandiose

kind of newspaper they wanted, but very finished

three

money.

I'd just

my fourth novel and was no longer under contract to write

TV plays

"You wrote

H

little

ideas about the

a year

—

plays for

TV? How'd you come

to be doing that?"

Jan Carew

"A

one of

television executive heard

Programme and

me

she offered

year for their idiot's lantern. But

more radical, company."

the

BBC became

"I'd like to see

find the time?"

43

my plays on the BBC

Third-

a contract to write three plays a

when my

less

and

became more and

plays

less interested,

one of your plays sometime

Malcolm asked himself

.

.

so

but

.

we parted

when

"But

rhetorically.

will

let's

I

get

back to Magnet." "Well, to cut a long story short, those three Jamaican Musketeers

knew that no matter how much I hedged and hesitated at first,

I'd finally agree to edit the paper,

that

if

Magnet were

and

I

did.

But

I

was convinced

we had to establish a reputation for truth, and we also had to offer our

to succeed,

being fearless, for telling the

readers the very best of everything

—the

best layout, the best

writing, the best graphic arts, the best photographs, investigative reporting

about the Black condition

short, because everything

produce a

first-rate

a

printing

"An

best

in Britain. In

a shoestring,

we had to

paper that both served the community and

What happened

Rudolph Dunbar sympathetic English lord who owned the most modern press in Europe

looked good.

knew

was being run on

and the

next

is

that old

—

English lord?

Am

I

hearing right?"

"Yes, the House of Lords, that house of the living dead, sports

an occasional maverick

who

breaks ranks with his peers. There's

even the odd Communist lord. The British ruling class

is

deft at

kicking troublemakers upstairs and suffocating them with honors.

Long ago, they even made Henry Morgan, one of the most murderous of pirates, a 'sir' and appointed him governor of Jamaica, and old Sir Henry ended up hanging several of his former buddies."

"Kicking people upstairs

Malcolm "I

just

wouldn't work in America,"

said.

suppose that right now,

we both laughed

before

and decadent society

I

it

wouldn't work there,"

I

agreed, and

added, "It would need an old, urbane,

like this

one to make the good old

kicking-upstairs business work."

British

GHOSTS

44

"We've got the decadent

"A

IN

OUR BLOOD

bit,"

Malcolm

said.

cynical observer once quipped that

America leaped from

barbarism to decadence without an intermediary period of civilization,"

I

said,

and Malcolm, nodding agreement, declared, "The

enslavement of our African ancestors was the worst form of

barbarism

known

mankind and

to

after

was

it

abolished, the

lynching of thousands of Negroes under the noses of those

who

were supposed to be upholding the law only added hypocrisy to the barbarism." Malcolm, having said this with a harsh edge to his

me

voice, smiled and, looking at

get too

worked up about

mockingly, added,

thing, though,

for as long as

you

live,"

heavy and somber,

I

I

think

I

these things, don't you?"

You have

"You're a new convert, Malcolm.

The curious

"You

is

fire in

your

belly.

that the fire will never burn itself out

said,

and

as the

tried to dispel

mood in the room became

by continuing

it

my

tale

about

Magnet in a light and almost facetious vein. "Anyway, we phoned his lordship, and he invited us to dinner. During dinner at his club, we convinced him to have our paper printed at his plant at rock-bottom cost.

He

agreed to

this,

adding

was the smallest venture he'd ever bought into. Then, on top of what we'd asked him to do, he instructed his public relations office to do everything possible to help us, and he also gave the same instructions to his technical staff at the plant. That's why the publication of the first issue was announced on the BBC news and why we had that array of VIPs at our reception at the Commonthat ours

wealth Institute."

Without looking up, Malcolm said soberly, "Jan, we're both We even look like blood relatives, but your world's very different from mine. And yet ... I wouldn't exchange places Black.

.

with you. Anyway,

I

.

.

couldn't.

Could

smile and added, "That's not to say

I?"

I

"You know, Malcolm, Blake once

He

looked up with a slow

don't envy you."

wrote,

The

tigers of

wrath

are wiser than the horses of instruction.' You're one of the tigers of

wrath, and

I,

one of the horses of instruction."

"That's deep," he said, nodding approvingly, "I must remember

Jan Carew

45

This Blake fellah really hit a bull's-eye. The Scottish fellah at Oxford Union debate quoted him, too." "McDiarmid," I said. "Yeah, that's him. If only I had the time to read everything I should read! Blake sounds interesting," he exclaimed and added with a that.

the

laugh, " Tigers of wrath,' huh!

When

did this Blake guy live?"

"In the mid seventeen and early eighteen hundreds."

"When

was popping." "But Blake was an enemy of slavery, and he wrote so passionately about Black folk that, long afterwards, some of us, reading him for the first time, believed that he had to be one of us." "He was a white liberal then." "He was a great artist, a poet, an engraver, a philosopher king, a slavery

visionary,"

I

said heatedly.

"All right, Jan."

He

laughed, stopped pacing up and down, put

a reassuring hand on my shoulder, and observed, "You get all worked up about these bookish things, eh?" "The Black activist part of me sometimes collides with the

creative part

and sparks begin to

"Islam not only makes glues I

them

all

together. So even

my head,"

fly inside

though sparks

can control them before they

still fly

I

confessed.

my

life fit, it

inside

my head,

the scattered pieces of

start fires."

"The sparks are necessary," I said, but he didn't hear me. "Your head's full of quotes and books " he started saying, but when I was about to interrupt he raised his hand and said, mockingly, "Your colonial education."

—

Malcolm's

travels

had catapulted him

into arenas

where the

conventional American Black/white obsessions were no longer trapping him in a vortex of rage and hatred. Freed from the psychological entrapment of these pathologies, he had time to

review the events of his whole

Muhammad's Manichean

life.

His mind, too, freed from Elijah

doctrines, was opening like a desert was now open to new ideas, prepared to explore new intellectual vistas. Paradoxically, when he was an

flower after the rains.

It

GHOSTS

46

outlaw and a criminal

in

IN

01 R BLOOD

New York and Boston, the time and space

he had carved out for himself

won

for

him an outlaw's freedom.

For compared to the "straight" world, the world of crime was truly

an equal opportunity one, with

its

own

codes for interracial

its own very different prejudices and taboos. While American majority embraced racist ideas and practices as though they were biblical canons, in the underworld race and

mingling and

the white

ethnicity mattered only

when

turf

was being apportioned and

different fiefdoms of crime allocated. In that world,

Black, white, brown, or yellow playthings,

and

a Black

man

—were regarded

sporting a white

more

the

women as sexual

woman on

his

arm

would merely be proclaiming that he was one of the top dogs in the hierarchy of crime. The woman in that aberrant culture, therefore, was not a person, but a creature for pleasure. As such, she could be exploited and cast aside, and her color was irrelevant. Malcolm's freewheeling, dangerous, but exciting outlaw ended with a draconian prison sentence, and solitude of a prison cell that the early teachings of his

life

as

an

was in the mother and

it

father began to reassert themselves. His mother, hearing about his

—

jail sentence, had asked his brother Wilfred to tell him and this was before he became a Black Muslim convert that "Now that this has happened, Malcolm boy, don't serve time, let the time serve you!" Those words linked him to a host of childhood admonitions that contained enduring moral lessons from which he could never escape again. So prison became a University of Hunger for him, and he did make the time he spent there serve him well. The next phase, that of becoming a Black Muslim and spending twelve years as an idolator at the beck and call of Elijah Muhammad, was one that he regretted bitterly after he discovered what he called "the Messenger's religious fakery and immorality." It was, however, more than anything else, what he had believed that Elijah Muhammad stood for that attracted him to the man and his movement. When he found out that the Messenger was not practicing what he preached, he felt compelled to expose him and to break with his movement. "That was a period," he informed me with a naive vehemence,

—

47

Jan Carew

"when

I

rinsed

my

brain out with fresh water and began to

my life. I began to see more clearly than ever that when went fishing for souls long since abandoned by society, I had to no drinking, no smoking, no fooling around with set an example women. In short, I had to match my actions with beliefs. Fakery and immorality might work for a while, but when you're found restructure

I

—

out, your

movement

In Africa, the

dies."

Middle

East, Europe,

and

however,

in Britain,

Malcolm was confronted with an array of new complexities in race relations. Meeting Black and brown heads of state in Third World countries he could, for the

first

time in his

life,

catch illuminating

glimpses of societies from the top looking down, societies in which the rulers

which the

and the ruled were the same color and

also societies in

levers controlling the productive forces in so-called

independent societies were imperialist hands.

still

He was

firmly in the grip of invisible white

also beginning to discern, after the

euphoria of seeing "Black people in charge of their

some of those

own

destiny,"

and the cliques around them, in the midst of trumpeting anticolonial slogans and condemning racism, were actively collaborating with the enemy and showing more contempt for their own people than the white proconsuls had done before them. In his encounters with prime ministers, presidents, and

that

rulers

hereditary rulers, he had begun to forge

new intellectual

tools with

which to probe some of the complex workings of different social, political, economic, and psychological forces that he encountered on his travels. He was beginning to see clearly that in newly independent countries, questions of economic power assumed a

paramountcy over those of race. This was particularly evident where the Black/white color codes of settler societies no longer applied. During this period of what Paulo Freire termed "deschooling," Malcolm realized that the sons and daughters of the African diaspora who had been internationalized by the most brutal population displacement in recorded history had also been ghettoized physically and psychologically, wherever they'd been transplanted. And, as he described it, "First they stole us from Africa, and then they tried to steal Africa from us."

GHOSTS

48

OUR BLOOD

IN

"You

said that you're an

didn't

you?" Malcolm asked suddenly, and, taken aback,

before answering

on again,

off again atheist earlier on, I

paused

somewhat guardedly, "I'm somewhere between

being an agnostic and an atheist and a denizen of the African and

Amerindian

knew "I

that

I

spirit

was never allowed

growing up," duce

me by

I

He

worlds."

had to answer

more

is

"The

village folk

I

fully.

to see myself as an individual

explained.

saying, 'This

kept his eyes fixed on me, and

his question

when I was

would always

intro-

Ethel Carew's boy, his grandfather

was

Schoolmaster Robertson, and Louisa Hintzen was his grand-

mother on

You

grew up in a matriarchy. This was not true of my village as a whole but it was certainly true about my extended family the women ruled and they almost invariably outlived the men. The womb of a mother was regarded as the only certain place from which an authentic blood line could be traced. So I grew up convinced that my maternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, great aunts and great uncles, and their broods were my closest relatives. It was impossible for me to see myself as an individual. I even had a female ancestral spirit protector. My mother would say to me over and over again, 'Your grandmother's his

mother's

side.'

see,

I

—

spirit is

protecting you' or 'Your grandmother's spirit will always "

look out for your interests

Malcolm laughed out

—

'

loud.

"Spirit protectors?" he asked,

"My

spirit

protector

"But you need intermediaries, don't you? Elijah

is

Allah."

Muhammad

no substitute for that of a blood was relative who has already passed on to the Spirit World. That's what one for a while, but there

my village

is

folk believe. That's the

—

"And what about you? Do you

believe it?"

had malaria as a child, night after night in my dreams I'd seen the grandmother who'd died before I was born. She'd be sitting at the foot of my bed. When I would tell my Hindu nurse about this dream, she'd say, 'Don't worry, it's your grandmother

"When

I

looking after you.'

"You'd

"

get along well with

my

mother," he said with a cryptic

49

Jan Carew

"She always believed in all this West Indian and dreams and things supernatural."

smile. spirits

He able.

I

felt,

however, that

more

if

Malcolm could take the business of his would no longer see himself

seriously, then he

as a lonely, beleaguered figure

and

"Who tapped

no one. would you choose

It

his

own

to be a spirit protector?"

He

asked.

I

forehead with his long fingers, and then he replied

suppose

.

.

my father

.

.

.

.

my mother's locked away in

world."

was on

the tip of

my tongue to ask him if he ever really tried to

enter her world, but this

and

desisted

surrounded by enemies and idola-

trusting

haltingly, "I

her

about

shifted restlessly in his chair, obviously feeling uncomfort-

ancestral links

tors

stuff

was so personal and presumptuous

shifted the conversation to

my own

that

I

experiences

instead.

"My

with

village,

its

bewildering variety of cultures, taught

me

from childhood onwards to respect the occult and the supernatural. I took it for granted that I was part of an extended family which, in turn, had visceral connections with ancestral ancestral memories.

human dreams, left

for

and

My village was a deep, fathomless reservoir of and mysteries. Before I had scooped up enough from the

fears, fantasies, passions,

my wanderings

abroad,

reservoir to last

me

anywhere

world and

in the

spirits

I

for several lifetimes. That's feel

why

secure within myself.

I

can travel

When

I

read

Hamlet's observation to his friend Horatio that 'there are more

and earth remember thinking

things in heaven

philosophy,'

I

.

.

.

Than

are dreamt of in your

to myself that I'd already

known

and accepted this as a fact of life since I was a child. "As I said before, in our culture you are defined by who your ancestors were, starting from your grandparents and greatgrandparents. religious

Once

that

is

done, then you can deal with specific

and other questions. So,

in following tradition,

I

can best

you about myself by starting with my grandparents. My was a successful smuggler and a kind of Black buccaneer. Captaining a two-masted schooner, he traded contra-

tell

paternal grandfather

GHOSTS

50

IN

OUR BLOOD

band between the Caribbean islands and South America. My mother's father was a village schoolmaster and an African nationalist. His mother my great-gran believed in the Yoruba Orishas, and she always converted a room in her houses into a shrine. Both grandfathers were married to tall, handsome, and

—

—

My

independent women.

fiercely

mother, a Wesleyan Methodist.

my

mother plucked me out of

priest.

it

She then Protestant-ized

I

father

first

was

went to

when

I

me by

Catholic,

a

a Jesuit school, but

told her

sending

I

wanted

me

passionate Christian believer at sixteen, but at seventeen

my

grandfather's library.

to be a

to a Scottish

Presbyterian high school run by Canadian missionaries.

ered Voltaire's writings in

my

I

was

a

discov-

I

remem-

I still

ber

how

his

opening salvo against the Catholic church, when he wrote that

that rebellious

Frenchman

riveted

me

to the

ground with

was the first knave who met the first fool.' "Voltaire, huh?" Malcolm declared, writing the name down in his diary, as he had been doing now and then during our talk. "Is '

'the first priest

that t-e-a-rV"

"No,

t-a-i-r-er

"You speak French?" "Reasonably

well.

I

started learning

it

in high school,

and then

I

studied in Paris."

"Where haven't you languages.

felt like

I

and Mecca.

I

a fool

always had to

like talking into

man! I wish I could speak foreign in Guinea and Morocco, and in Egypt have an interpreter at my elbow. It was

been,

emptiness

all

the time. I've started studying Arabic

and French." "Heavens above!" I thought. "If they'd only allow him the time to live and breathe. He'd learn so much and do so much with what he learned!"

Malcolm returned chuckle,

"We

to the subject of religion, saying with a

have knaves

—Black and white ones—

telling

Black

fools

to turn the other cheek, to sing and pray, promising us that

once

we

get to heaven, there'll be treasures waiting for us there.

Meanwhile, the white man These preachers

tell lies

steals all the treasures here

to their congregations,

and they

on

earth.

tell lies

to

Jan Carew

51

Allah. Knaves and fools! Knaves and fools!" He repeated the words and laughed out loud before confessing, "At seventeen, I wouldn't have known if Voltaire was the brand name of a canned soup or a writer. I only became hooked on reading when I was in prison. Knaves and fools!" he muttered once more. "That's

Christianity for you!"

"But Christians haven't cornered the market on knaves and fools,"

I

pointed out. "There's old Elijah

Black Muslims, and you were

Muhammad

and the

a part of their closed, mentally

closeted circle." I

didn't

know

if

he would take

me up on

this challenge, since

might have touched a sore spot, but he sat back at the ceiling,

fools in

of

and admitted,

many

religions

my mind was

"I

and

shut tight.

on such a high pedestal that with Elijah

I

looked

know now that there are knaves and

for twelve years, It's

in his chair,

an important section

dangerous to put any

all his faults

Muhammad. He was

human

are out of sight.

the knave

and

I

was

I

being

did this

the fool,

and

you what a big fool I was! For a while, I sincerely was a divine being. I made myself believe it. I refused to see all the warts even when they were right in front of me. When I found out that Elijah was having sex with his young secretaries and that four of them were pregnant, I was stunned! You know, that wouldn't have happened if I'd been listening to the little voices in my head telling me that all was not well in the house I

can't

tell

believed that he

of the so-called Messenger."

A quotation from one of my Berbice High School history lessons my mind. I remembered Cardinal Wolsey lamenting, "Had I but served my God with half the zeal with which I had served my king, he would not in my old age have left me naked to my enemies." flashed across

"Well,"

I

thought, "Malcolm's only thirty-nine, at least three

decades away from old age, but his lament

is

just as

anguished and

poignant as the cardinal's." All of a

sudden Malcolm

can ever imagine his

sat

up and said once again,

"No one

how absolute my belief in Elijah Muhammad and movement was, and now he's after me like a

Black Muslim

GHOSTS

52 bloodhound.

It's

IN

01 R

crystal-clear in

BLOOD

my mind why

I

broke with

his

movement and with him. He was acting as a tranquilizer instead of wake up and resist their oppressors, and

mobilizing our folks to

any tranquilizing movement, no matter who's

at the

head of

it, is

only postponing the day of reckoning."

what you're going to tell our folks here in Britain?" "I'm going to tell them to organize, protect themselves, don't wait until the whites start lynching, burning, terrorizing them, and finally sending them to the ovens, because until they learn to protect themselves, the law won't do it for them, and the police won't do it for them, and the good white citizens and many Black ones will stand aside and look on without a murmur of protest, and "Is that

their silence will kill as effectively as the us. It's

human And

guns the

our destiny as an African people to

racists use against

fight for civil rights

and

acknowledge that

he's

rights." I

mused

changed? That

silently,

"Why

at the heart of

can't they

what he

is

now

espousing

is

a

devastating critique of the conventional Black politics of tranquilization and stasis? Gandhi, paraphrasing Thoreau, his

Western

spiritual mentors,

who was one

of

once said that absolute consistency

and Malcolm's mind was one with an unlimited capacity for absorbing new ideas. That is why he has now decided to 'join forces with whomever and whatever

was

the hallmark of a small mind,

benefits all peoples.'

Why

aren't they talking

about

his

new

goals

and the fact that he has changed his worldview? His concepts of race and class and his political, social, and economic theories have moved outside the narrow confines of his former religious beliefs. And now he is working to wean his followers away from the Black/white gridlock of perpetual racial antagonisms."

Malcolm came out of on

a perpetual journey

his long reverie to declare: "It's as

on

a slave ship,

and when the

if

we're

slaves get

noisy and violent and threaten to tear the whole ship apart, the

down below to negotiate with the so-called ringleaders. The guys they send down have been dealing with Negroes for a long time, and they know how to size them up.

white captain sends a delegation

So, as they talk to them, they

make mental

notes and separate the

Jan Carew

few

who can't

53

be bought or broken from the ones

who can

be,

and

come on deck where there's air to breathe and sunlight to warm them. Once they're on deck, the hatch is battened down again. The ones who can't be bought or broken are quietly taken aside and thrown to the sharks. The they open the hatch, invite them

others

know

all

to

what's going on, but they pretend

because they're in cahoots with the whites

it's

who

not happening

are getting rid of

troublesome Black leaders. So those chosen ones are fed well, and then they're dressed up and encouraged to strut around like roosters.

When the

folks

down below become

impatient and begin

to create a racket, those bought-and-paid-for misleaders

hatch a

little

and shout down to them, 'Brothers and

open the

sisters,

be

Here we are negotiating with these white folk, while you're making things difficult for us by acting so uncivilized!' Then they go back to living high on the hog until the next blowup threatens. And when those misleaders can't keep the rebellious brothers and sisters quiet any longer, the whites get rid of them and another delegation goes below deck and brings up a new batch." "When will it end, Malcolm?" I asked ruefully. "When everyone comes on deck and seizes the ship with the help of some of the white sailors who hated the job they were doing and patient!

who

realized that

when Black

folks

were liberating themselves,

they were also liberating them from having to be oppressors. At that stage of liberation, too, those

who

follow can from then

onwards keep an eye on their leaders night and day to make sure and action are in proper alignment."

that talk

132

THREE My commitment boundaries nor

cause

in

to

our struggle recognizes neither

limits: only

those of us

our hearts are willing

who

carry our

run the risks.

to

—Rigoberta Menchii When you

start thinking for yourselves

you frighten

them.

—Malcolm X

After meeting Malcolm, a Black

man

in a

I

realized

more

clearly than ever that as

white-dominated world, having abandoned

that uneasy psychological no-man's-land between an

ebony tower

and the reality of a stultified and oppressive colonial society, I too had been subjected to a mind-wrenching, psychological tug-ofwar, pulled by opposing deception. leader

My

beliefs,

ideas,

and nostrums of

self-

friendly encounters with this extraordinary Black

made me more

many oppressed

certain than ever that the true history of

people's collective pain, sorrow, and triumph

only a small part of which

is

recorded

—

is

yet to speak with the

same measured cadences of truth and compassion to black, brown, is why, over the years, I could see with absolute clarity that socialism was the only system through which our true histories could be told. "What kind of socialism?" yellow, and white ears alike. That

55

GHOSTS

56

IN

OUR BLOOD

everyone immediately leaps into the fray and asks, and

humane and

is,

a

of

life

and to

all

resilient socialism that

human

needs

is

—material,

my answer

sensitive to the

rhythms

cultural, psychological,

and individual. Above all, it must be a patient and tolerant socialism. "But that is more socialism as a religion spiritual, collective,

than socialism as a political ideology!" derisory voices shout at me,

and

I

reply, "If

it is,

then so be

Dostoyevsky, voicing one of his

it!

and prophetic insights, once said that should the Russian masses embrace communism, it would succeed only if they turned it into a religion. The Russian masses did embrace communism, for inspired

a

moment

and

in history,

when

but

religion

tion tried to foist

its

own

brutally suppressed

gods, saints, and devils onto that society

for three-quarters of a century,

collapsed. This collapse brings

it

another Dostoyevskian adage to mind: life

was

a parasitic bureaucracy with a lamentable absence of imagina-

becomes a carnival of

During a

from

lull in

if

God

does not

devils.

our conversation

his carnival of devils

I

"Malcolm escaped God of the Muslims

thought,

and embraced the

now

he's

brooding over

this

only to find himself on a doomsday roller coaster, and refusing to slow

it

then

exist,

down and jump

melancholy thought for a while,

I

off." After

turned to him and said,

"My

great-gran Belle didn't approve of the Jesuit belief that martyrs

become more alive in the minds of their flocks after their deaths. Her contention was that once you're safely dead, folks invent an entirely different persona for you an idolized version that's as different from the real you as an Eskimo is from a Zulu. She felt that leaders must live long enough for their followers to remember how they evolved and changed and matured with time. When you die prematurely, she says, followers only have fragments to remem-

—

ber."

"You're on that subject again? else

my

is

there to

head

—

tell

I

know you mean

well, but

what

you? Yes, there's a death sentence hanging over

"And you've chosen

to rush headlong into

There must be another way."

Mantop's arms?

Jan Carew

"As

I

you

told

before, the

were sad,

smiling, but his eyes I

Muslims

57

say,

reflective,

launched into reminiscences about

'It is

written.' "

He was

and inward-looking.

my great-gran once more to

counter his fatalism.

"My great-gran

Belle used to tell

me

that there are ghosts in our

blood, and that we're lucky because the lowliest, the ones

world of the

suffer

most

spirit

world. So African and Amerindian

world.

in the

And

living, are

always top dogs

who

in the

spirits rule that spirit

those ancestral spirits whisper warnings, whenever

we're about to do something reckless or foolhardy. Right

now they

should be whispering to you that, perhaps, surviving for our cause is

more important than dying for it." "The spirit world's fine, but I want our

world of the I

living

pretended that

— I

folk to be free in the

hadn't heard him and continued:

"When I was

boy of seven my mother moved me to a new school, and the first day, a group of bullies began calling me names and cursing my mother. Well, I stood up to them, and they beat the hell out of me. a small

was daubing iodine on my bruises, she told me, 'It's the Carib blood in us that makes us want to fight to the death. But where are the Caribs now? Gone! Vanished! Next time those children taunt and bully you, use your brain, boy! Run, but keep encouraging them to chase you. Once you reach your yard, grab your slingshot, sic the dogs on them, and Later on, while

my

great-gran Belle

attack.' She'd then insert her favorite

ending to

this advice

by

home spot, a sanctuary His infinite wisdom He gave us

declaring, 'The Almighty gave everyone a

spot, on this God's earth, but in two Africa and Guyana.' Malcolm, you also have two Africa and America so there's no excuse for rushing to meet Mantop. Let him come looking for you after you've lived out your full fourscore and ten years." Ignoring the pointed suggestion at the end of my story, Malcolm said, "So, I've got ghosts of Africans, Caribs, and Allah alone knows who else swimming in my blood, huh, Jan? That's something new." And he added with an excess of joviality while he

—

—

—

GHOSTS

58

IN

OUR BLOOD

laughed his wide-mouthed laugh until crow's

feet

webbed

the

corners of his eyes: "I have enough problems with the living. Besides, aren't ghosts supposed to be white like the Klan in robes?

Check

it

out

—when nighttime comes, black and white ghosts are some of our brothers and

integrated. So,

sisters

dreams can look forward to ghost time, since integration worked in America so far."

We I

did.

both laughed, but he enjoyed his

Malcolm then resumed

his

own

it's

joke

my

much more than

pacing for a while and cleaned his

rimless glasses absentmindedly before saying, "I secret spot,

with crossover

the only time that

sanctuary spot,

is.

wonder where my

Africa? America? Grenada?

Mecca?" I

posed the question directly to him once again, "Malcolm,

why

don't you go back to one of those friendly countries you just visited until things cool

"You sound

down

like

my

a bit?"

brother Wilfred," he said, with a sardonic

smile.

"Well,

why

don't you?"

"I could never

do

if I

insisted.

that," he said quietly.

"My great-gran Belle— " "Look, Jan,

I

go into

I

began to

exile,

it

say, but he interrupted

would turn out to be

me.

a case of out

of sight, out of mind." is already looming so and your words have already burnt themselves into people's brains, and nothing your enemies do can erase this. If you go into exile, those enemies will certainly pull out every dirty trick in their repertoire to try and discredit you. But with your austere lifestyle and your kind of unassailable integrity, they'd have to fabricate slanders, and in the long run these would

"Yes, that's a possibility, but your image

large in people's imaginations,

—

make them out to be liars "It won't make any difference," he said "What?"

backfire and

wearily.

"Exile."

and think and disseminate all kinds of incendiary ideas like Marti did, and Lenin did. The pen's still mightier than the sword. What about the electronic weapons in "But

you'll be able to write

Jan Carew

You

your arsenal?

59

could record speeches and your followers could

distribute the tapes

—

couldn't live like a fugitive. They'll never stop putting

"I

on me," he

contracts out

and

said with a chilling certainty,

I

thought:

"But things

will

change

.

.

.

attitudes will change. Talleyrand,

that wily old fox of a French statesman, one said that treason

is

a

matter of timing. Your incendiary ideas will look normal in a couple of decades." that

I

didn't even

I

had spoken with such urgency and passion

know I'd

raised

my voice. Malcolm paused in his my shoulder for a moment.

pacing and put a reassuring hand on

When I had cooled down,

I

thought:

"All too often, I'd heard the heroic rhetoric of transatlantic,

drawing-room revolutionaries, and then I'd seen those hot gospelers of revolution return home and settle into a mute, neocolonial opulence. Would Malcolm be any different?" I asked myself, "Maybe, he's afraid that he, too, might succumb?" For a moment, his calm and inexorable decision terrified me. I knew that I might have made a similar choice in the heat of the moment, but once I had time to reflect, I'd have mulled over a wide range of options and ended up taking a less heroic way out. I said to myself, "He's choosing martyrdom, but there must be other honorable choices. alone.

When

leaders alive?

will

He

shouldn't be

our people learn

Why must millions

left

how

to

The easy had

familiarity that

itself,

but

resolved one

live

way

would

or die?"

had developed between us soon

we were both profoundly aware

just discussed

this choice

of us remain impotent onlookers

while others decide whether our leaders should

serted

make

to keep irreplaceable

surface again

reas-

that the issue

and again

until

it

we

was

or the other.

Taking occasional sips of water from a tall glass, he said, "What do you Guyanese call death 'Mantop'? Well, ole Mantop didn't

—

get

me

in Cairo, but that doesn't alter the fact that I'm never

going

to die of old age."

There was something serene on the surface about Malcolm's acceptance of his imminent assassination, but

I

sensed that under-

GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD

60

neath his apparent serenity were feelings of despair and frustra-

about the

tion, anxieties

about the future of into

my morbid

his

and children, concern

fate of his wife

OAAU, and

a fierce desire to live.

ruminations, saying, "I'm sorry I'm

He broke not many

—one of them could have spent the time patiently building up movement that had many heads so that they — decapitated one or two or there'd be others to carry on

people in one

a

if

three,

"A hydra-headed for

him with

Black movement,"

a suggestion of

I

said,

ending the sentence

my own.

"Many black mamba heads raised to strike. They told me that black mambas make our rattlers look friendly by comparison. Any one of those "I like that," he said,

nodding

his approval.

hydra heads would have been able to detach

anywhere

in the

and

travel

world spreading the message. The others could

have been stay-at-home heads doing the

make

itself

movement

nitty-gritty things that

As matters stand now, if anything ..." happens to me. His voice trailed off and he gestured with his expressive hands. The extraordinary thing about Malcolm was that he could criticize himself with the same ruthlessness, the same intellectual honesty, with which he criticized his opponents. He could switch from one topic to another with an ease that startled and bewildered me. Besides, right at that moment, he seemed to be in the grip of an impulse to spill as much as possible out of his mind in the shortest possible time. He admitted halfa

jokingly,

strong.

"My system of dealing with people is this:

I

give everyone

watch and wait as they earn their marks." "So you hardly trust anyone? What about me? Haven't I earned any marks?" "Do you think I would have spent so much time with someone

zero,

who

and then

hadn't

I

moved from zero?"

"You've been talking to me for two days." "This business of trusting people carries strange thing

is

that the more people

I

risks, doesn't it?

trust, the

more

it

betrayed me. Just the other day, something happened, and

me

stop and think

but none too

—who was

much?"

it

that said

you should

The

seems have

trust

made all men

it

Jan Carew

61

poem 'If.' " me and smiled.

"Kipling, in his

He

looked at

"My colonial

education,"

I

explained, and he

bowed with mock

deference.

"Brainwashing," he taunted me, good-naturedly.

"And

it

"Only

worked,"

I

confessed.

partially," he

"Deschooling got dollops of

it

conceded with a

rid of a lot of

it,

grin.

but

I'll still

have to take great

my grave."

to

He ended this interlude of banter by pacing back and forth. Then pausing in the middle of the room, he said:

saw the OAAU doing from the very start was collecting the names of all the people of African descent who have professional skills, no matter where they are. Then we

"One

of the things that

I

could have a central register that

we

countries in Africa and elsewhere. ing names,

and then I gave the

list

could share with independent

Do you know, I started collectto someone who I thought was a

trusted friend, but both this so-called friend

peared. So I've got to start I

caught a glimpse of a

story,

and to assuage

reminded him

his

all

and the

anguish over

this

he told

this

Black-on-Black betrayal,

I

that during the Haitian revolution, the only person

who was

planters almost as

his chief of staff.

much

"Don't worry," he white chief of

disap-

over again."

terrible uncertainty in his eyes as

that Toussaint L'Ouverture could trust implicitly

Jacobin

list

"Age hated the bigoted French

as Dessalines did,"

said,

I

told him.

with a broad smile, "I might not have a

work with everyone who

staff.

But

said,

looking up at him with

I'll

was Age, a white

believes in

my

cause."

"Really?" rejoinder

I

was

mock

"Yes. But I've got to go about building a

The is

last

that

I

disbelief,

movement

carefully.

me when we were parting ahead of my followers, because if

thing an Egyptian friend said to

should never get too far

I'm so far ahead that I'm out of sight, they might turn back.

want

but his

a serious one.

I

don't

that to happen."

Sitting

down

directly opposite

me, he confessed, "The

first

time

GHOSTS

62

I\

01 R BLOOD

saw you, I thought that I was looking in a mirror and West Indian part of me that I know so little about." I

"My

seeing the

great-gran Belle used to say that we're blessed with the

blood of the most persecuted folks on earth

—Africans,

Caribs,

Portuguese Jews, French convicts from Devil's Island, Highland Scots,

and only the Lord alone knows what

cut ourselves,

we can

else

— so whenever we

see the ghosts of those others peeping out

from among the African and Amerindian blood

The ghosts

seeds.

are always there talking their conflicting talk until there's a tower

of Babel inside your head. So we've got to listen well and search out the kindest, the strongest, the

make them our own, and

that's

most human of those voices and where the African and Amerindian

part of us takes over."

"You're lucky," Malcolm said quietly, "you had a great-

grandmother

who

"She died when

was well over

linked you directly with your African past." I

was twelve,"

I

explained, "and at that time she

Nobody ever saw her birth certificate, but

a hundred.

my grandfather, the schoolmaster, said that she was a hundred and sixteen

when

she went to meet her Maker."

"You're lucky," Malcolm repeated. "In America, Black folks are mostly a people without a past.

about

my

my

I

always wanted to find out more

mother's Grenadian family, for example.

father's family, but

promising myself that

I

I

know about

know very little about hers. sit down with her and let

I'll

I'm always her

tell

me

remember about her family. Perhaps I'll do that home. Last time I saw her, her mind was clear as a return bell." He paused and added reflectively, "You know, she's been a Garveyite since she was nineteen, and, boy-oh-boy, was she ever the strict West Indian mother! When I was younger, I couldn't understand how she was pushed over the edge by those racist officials, but now I can. She was a widow working to support her seven children. No wonder she reached the breaking point. They everything she can

when

I

say that she "I

felt

persecuted."

He

sat

back and chuckled

wonder why! They'd cheated her out of

after

land

my

father's death,

—the

££

house

my

and

father

a white judge coveted

had

built

derisively.

the insurance

with his

money

our house and

own

hands. That

Jan Carew

63

judge wanted the house for one of his relatives. So the state took us

away from our mother and parceled us out to foster parents, and she was shoved into a mental hospital. But after twenty-five years of incarceration, twenty-five long years, she came out looking in better shape than those

went

who

to see her a couple of

five years

had gone by

since

railroaded her into that institution.

weeks after she was had last seen her

I

looked into the distance. "Twenty-five years

.

.

released.

was

seem

it

in

my

as

if all

mind, and

Twenty-

"He paused and ,"

.

he repeated and

my

ease,

those years had not rolled by. She read

what

me

then continued, "She was clearheaded and she put

made

I

I

guessed what was in hers.

We

at

didn't need

words." Listening to

him and averting

my

eyes,

I

thought, "This

is

the

most intimate confession he has made since we met. Perhaps the awareness that Mantop was waiting to snatch him away from the land of the living had made it slip out. But if he keeps on the path he's chosen, he'll never find out

the side that only his

Grenadian side with

its

about that other side of himself

mother could help him to discover scattered blood seeds. For

between them during that reunion, he had most

—the

in the silences likely

caught

waged for her and her and in a flash he might well have discerned how vast and complex the human spirit, human longings, and the human condition can be, and how unfettered and limitless the human imagination must be in order to encompass and plumb glimpses of the heroic fight his mother had family's survival,

them."

"We

all

have our private devils hounding us down,"

I

said,

opening a new phase of our conversation after an awkward pause.

"White devils," Malcolm said, and then he added with a mocking smile, "and Black ones. We also have our share of Black devils."

"Baudelaire, the French poet, once said that the cleverest trick

was to pretend he didn't exist." the nail on the head. That's the white man's game he lynches you, discriminates against you from cradle

the devil ever played

"He

hit

America

—

in

to

GHOSTS

64 grave,

OUR BLOOD

and then he pretends that he

Man, you "Blame

doing anything to you.

isn't

sure can pull those quotes out of a hat!" it

on

my

subject to one that

more

IN

at ease

and I changed the had been hesitating to talk about until I felt

colonial education," I

I

said,

with him.

"What about women and your monkish lifestyle?" He looked at me with narrowed eyes, and then

he said, "I

changed."

There was something mesmeric about Malcolm's asceticism, passionate devotion to Islam. of a

new

He was

possessed with

believer, and, as he'd said earlier,

his brain, his spirit, his

whole being with

it

was

as

all if

his

the fervor

he'd rinsed

fresh spring water.

I

had

number of questions about his break with Elijah Muhammad, for I was certain that there was more to it than the general assumption that it was based solely on his outrage and disillusionment at the behavior of the older man. Malcolm was wanted

to ask

him

a

anything but a simplistic devotee of Elijah. His Black Nationalist

had been gleaned from the early teachings of his Garveyite mother and father, his experiences as an outlaw in his early manhood, prison, the in-house cult-philosophy of the Black Muslims, and later his philosophy of resistance to racism and economic exploitation had been reshaped and internationalized. His break with Elijah Muhammad, therefore, was political and ideological, and in addition it was one of principle and the result of the traumatic discovery that an erstwhile idol had feet of clay. The statement that Malcolm had made about the Kennedy assassination was deliberately taken out of context and used as a device for silencing him. President Kennedy was assassinated on ideas

November 22, 1963. On December 1, Malcolm X, speaking at a Black Muslim rally at the Manhattan Center in New York, accused the late president of "twiddling his thumbs" while Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo, the Diem Birmingham were murdered. "Being an old farm boy myself," Malcolm said, "chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad." The next day, John Ali, the national brothers of South Vietnam, and four

*»V»"

little girls

in

Jan Carew secretary for the Nation of Islam,

mad had suspended Malcolm X John

65

announced that Eijah Muham-

for ninety days for his remarks.

Malcolm Shabazz did not Muslims when he made the comments. He was

Ali told reporters that "Minister

speak for the

speaking for himself and has been suspended from public speaking for the time being." it

was becoming

movement he had played a

leading role in

For some time before his suspension, however,

Malcolm

clear to

that the

creating

had locked

tried to

make

it

itself

and every time he was thwarted by the

into a blind vortex,

a genuine activist one, he

byzantine intrigues of sychophants clustered around Elijah. So,

with or without his discovery of the Messenger's amorous adventures, a

break would have been inevitable. The nation-building

movement and

fantasies of the

hand, and for

its

Malcolm

in its

its

political quiescence

militant rhetoric

on the

other,

made

on the one

it

impossible

to continue ignoring the irreconcilable contradictions

philosophy of an absolute racial separation. In addition, he

when he became aware

confessed that

of the Nation's secret

dealings with the Ku Klux Klan, he realized that this movement, which he had helped to popularize, had in fact maneuvered into a corner from which it could not extricate itself. He had then concluded that he either had to take over the movement from inside and transform it or break with it completely and create

another. In addition,

leaders

who

Malcolm had

a disdain for Black petit bourgeois

dangled the promise of material rewards

like the

apple

of Tantalus above the heads of their followers. But nodding his

head and smiling, he told

and

in every

way

me

that Elijah

Muhammad was

craftier

superior to the run-of-the-mill Black leaders.

The

old man, he affirmed, in the midst of preaching austerity and

imposing Calvinist

strictures

on

his followers, did

have a weakness

women, but Elijah should never be underestimated because he knew his followers well and could operate levers of patronage with consummate skill. He

for opulent living

and

a passion for teenage

could also appeal, at one and the same time, to their noblest aspirations

and

their basest

and most mercenary

instincts.

Behind

GHOSTS

66

the scene, too, he could,

IN

when

01 R BLOOD

necessary, be benignly tolerant and

charming. As an example of the old man's shrewdness, Malcolm described how, while his less imaginative followers raised a hue

and cry about it, he had appointed non-Muslims as editors of the movement's influential newspaper Muhammad Speaks. At meetings with his inner circle, a former editor of that paper told me, Elijah would sit and listen patiently as his lieutenants vied and then he'd

and ask if any of them could talk directly to Allah and have the Lord of Worlds talk to them; and when no one dared make this claim, he'd remind them that he, and he alone, was the Chosen One, the Messenger. Having silenced them, he would then reveal, slowly and deliberately, what Allah had allegedly told him. for his favors,

call for silence

Malcolm, however, never attempted to make any such claims. His followers saw him as a bold, transparently honest, and

on the lowliest and limbs that were stiff from

incorruptible leader. His mesmeric voice called the

most despised

too much

Malcolm was, cosmology, a

up and stretch and thousands responded.

to stand

kneeling,

indeed,

truth-teller

the scorned, the rejected,

like

that archetypal figure in

who was

willing to risk

all in

Teme

defense of

and the despised. He told truths

to his

followers with an unsurpassed eloquence before the bullets of assassins silenced him.

raCSfc

FOUR To be, or not to be

Whether

'tis

—

nobler

that is the question

in the

mind

to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or

to take

arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end

them.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

It's

unfortunate that those bent on making Malcolm

icon

now

X

into an

that he's safely dead are, in fact, inventing a legendary

A new generation

being that threatens to supplant the real one.

of

idolators has either deliberately or inadvertently ignored the two crucial speeches that

London School

Malcolm made

Oxford Union and the Malcolm used those presti-

at the

of Economics. In fact,

gious international platforms to state quite categorically that he

was no longer

the spiritual

and

intellectual prisoner of a sterile

philosophy of race in which, to use his the

Negro [was

own

words, "the revolt of

depicted] as simply a racial conflict of Black against

white, or as a purely American problem."

He

spelled out clearly in

made at Barnard College that he was now an interna-

those two speeches, and in another he had

during the same three-month period, tionalist

who saw

himself and his

OAAU

as part of a "global

rebellion ... of the exploited against the exploiter."

He

also stated

quite explicitly that while, as a Muslim, he believed in the brother-

67

GHOSTS

68

hood

of

all

men,

amity with

all

not

this did

human

I\

01 R

mean

BLOOD

that Black people in the

beings should forgo

themselves against the violence of

all

name

of

rights to defend

racists.

The Oxford Union debate was a milestone in Malcolm's career and as one of the boldest spokespersons for Black

as a truth-teller

liberation to

emerge

in the

phoned

to invite

twentieth century.

know what

"I honestly didn't

me

to

to expect

when Tony Abrahams

Oxford," Malcolm confessed during our

wide-ranging conversations three months

At the end of

later.

his

term as president of the Oxford Union, Anthony Abrahams was

supposed to debate the president of the Cambridge Union. To bolster his side, he

most

to

was expected

to invite the person he admired

debate with him. Anthony chose Malcolm. Another

Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish nationalist, and Communist. "Looking back at my four-day visit as a

speaker on his side was poet,

guest of the

Oxford Union," Malcolm continued,

clearly that the

minute

stepped off the train,

I

I

"I

remember

felt I'd

suddenly

backpedaled into Mayflower-time. Everything was smaller than expected, and slower and older. Age

was

just seeping

I

out of the

day they arrived

gowns as and were then handed

and they were riding

bicycles that should've

pores of every stone. The students were wearing caps and if

they graduated the

diplomas years been

dumped

later,

first

long ago.

I

couldn't help wondering

mistake accepting the invitation to take part

if

I'd

made

in the debate.

a

But

Tony Abrahams had met me at the train station and, somehow, his Jamaican ease banished some of my doubts. From the moment we met,

I

couldn't help noticing

how

easily he dealt

with those white

them seemed to know him. He kept his Jamaicaness and yet he walked around Oxford like he owned it. Negroes at Harvard and Yale always looked to me as if they were being apologetic and making excuses for their Black selves in what they're tricked into thinking is a white holy-of-holies. Looking back, I must admit that I liked Oxford. It was old and cold, but the students had open, inquiring minds. It was a place where a ruling class reserved a special space for the best of minds to be thrown into a brain-pool where they could learn to think their way out of folks at

Oxford, and

a lot of

Jan Carew

any

situation,

folks

no matter how

need to look

into,

but

69

difficult.

That's something Black

we would have

shape ours

to

we'd have to carve out our space to think in the middle of a struggle in the inner cities, and from there we would have to see the whole world. Still, at the end of every one of those four days, differently;

I was alone in my guest apartment, the hustle and bustle of Harlem never failed to break into the silence and remind me that there at Oxford, I was near the top of a pyramid while below were the oppressed carrying it on their backs."

when

Malcolm was assassinated less than three months after his Oxford visit, and Anthony Abrahams never again saw him alive. A year later, after Anthony had graduated from Oxford, I ran into him in had swept us both into directions that neither of us earlier. I had moved to Ghana and was an adviser to President Nkrumah's Publicity Secretariat and the editor of African Review. Anthony was workGhana.

Life

could have predicted even six months

ing for the British Broadcasting Corporation as the

first

Black

announcer on "Panorama" a prime-time program that did depth analyses of current events. the opening of the project that

was

the

He had come

Akosombo Dam,

a grandiose hydroelectric

most ambitious of the

programs Nkrumah had

in-

to Accra to cover

large-scale industrial

initiated.

Ghana was a major producer of bauxite ore, gold, and cocoa, and Nkrumah's ambitious but logical plan was to use the dam's relatively cheap hydroelectric power to transform a backward colonial economy into a twentieth-century one. He envisaged an independent Ghana evolving very rapidly from an exporter of raw materials to a manufacturer of finished products

—aluminum

products from bauxite and a variety of lucrative chocolate prod-

from raw cocoa. Like Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Nkrumah was on prodding his people into taking a great leap forward; however, an ominous and symbolic occurrence marred the official

ucts

intent

When the first rush of current surged from the dam's generators into the national grid, the main transformers were blown and Accra was plunged into a primordial darkness. It opening of the dam.

GHOSTS

70

was

IN

01 R BLOOD

though that embarrassing blackout (and

as

it

could have been

was meant to jolt the president into acknowledging that there was a wide chasm between his soaring vision and the reality of Ghana's shaky infrastructure. the result of sabotage or sheer incompetence)

Akosombo Dam,

Shortly after covering that opening of the

Anthony was back

in

Ghana again

to report for the

BBC on

While President Nkrumah was on

entirely different event.

to a peace mission in Hanoi, his

his

an

way

government was overthrown by a

cabal of high-ranking military officers. In the immediate aftermath of the coup,

all

of the senior officials

who

were being rounded up and imprisoned

supported

in the

name

Nkrumah of a junta

calling itself the National Liberation Council. This junta, in the

midst of making hypocritical noises about "democracy," was in the process of releasing one batch of political prisoners and

them in the prisons with another group. Since soldiers had already visited my lodgings when I was not at home, I knew that my arrest was imminent. I also knew that if my arrest was replacing

my

publicized abroad, the likelihood of

disappearing without a

would be considerably reduced. When he left Ghana this second time, Anthony took a coded message to Andrew Salkey, a trusted friend and colleague, for me. It was signed Black Midas, the trace

title

my

of

first

novel.

I

knew

that once

Andrew

got hold of this

coded missive, he would take immediate steps to publicize the news of my arrest. And that was exactly what happened. However,

Anthony

manded BBC's

me

told

him, claiming that by helping

role of impartiality.

Thirty years radio I

BBC superiors had reprime he had compromised the

afterwards that his

show

in

later,

while reminiscing about the past on a popular

Kingston, Jamaica, an urbane, rotund Anthony and

began talking about our days

Oxford, and

in

Ghana, about Malcolm's visit to Oxford Union debate.

about their participation in the

After leaving the broadcasting studio,

I

could not help thinking

Malcolm had envisaged spawning a plethora of movements that would unite the continent and end

that the Africa liberation

white economic domination after his death

— been

in short

order had

riven, splintered,

—hardly

a decade

and further balkanized by a

Jan Carew

71

war

succession of brutal coups d'etat. In addition, as the cold intensified, the

new

U.S. anti-insurgent policy of low-intensity

and impoverished vast areas of the ancestral which Malcolm had had such great expectations.

conflict devastated

homeland

for

Some people now claim

that

to see the end of the cold

Malcolm did not live disasters on the African

fortunate

it is

war and

the

continent preceding the cold war's demise. Those successive disas-

make

they say,

ters,

Congo

the brutal imperialist intervention in the

had so graphically described seem mild by comparison, and this would have filled him with despair. Others, however, point out that had he lived, his resolve would have been unshaken, and he would have continued to give heart to those still fighting to make the African dream of unity and freedom a reality. that he

I left Jamaica shortly after taking part in that radio show with Anthony, but I had asked Dermot Hussey to do a tape recording of

Anthony

talking about Malcolm's visit to

Oxford and

their joint

participation in the debate. In the interview with Dermot, the

Jamaican

inflections in

Anthony's voice were as familiar to

me

as

they had been three decades before.

"Where

shall

I

begin?" was his opening gambit.

"At the beginning," was Dermot's

rejoinder.

"Well, here goes: there's a tradition that the president of the

Oxford Union would,

at the

end of

his term, in

what they

Presentation Debate invite the person in Britain

whom

call

the

he most

—and they appreciated have chosen someone —so

admires. For me, that person wasn't British the fact that

they asked I

would

if

I

wouldn't necessarily

like to

man in America who's reaction

I

got.

I

causing

all

those problems?' That's the sort of

think they thought he

didn't

seem to know the

made

contact with

what have you, but

difference.

Malcolm it

X

was Martin Luther King. They Anyhow, they agreed, and we

and

turned out at the

said he wouldn't be able to

We

British

was anybody from Jamaica or anywhere else that invite. I said, 'Yes, Malcolm X!' 'Malcolm who? The

there

make

it

sent the necessary tickets last

moment that he called and

because he was going to Mecca.

way back from did. He came up to

spoke again, and he then agreed that on his

Mecca, he would pass through

and

Britain.

And

he

GHOSTS

72

IN

BLOOD

01 R

Oxford and spent four days with me. The four days, of course, included the Thursday night of the debate. I think he came on Tuesday or Wednesday and stayed

till

Friday.

"Well, I've always followed the American

and

I

saw him

sense to me.

I

as very

much

the person

civil rights struggle,

who was making

the

didn't believe in those days that nonviolence

going to be the answer. In

fact,

I

really

most

was

am surprised at the extent to

which America, short of a violent overthrow or a violent upsurge, would have agreed to go along with the degree of social changes that have taken place. So my hopes were on Malcolm X, not on Martin Luther King. I saw Martin Luther King as well, I saw him as someone complementary to Malcolm, but my man was always Malcolm. "There are a couple of things that stick in my memory. First of .

all,

when he came, I had been evening

six in the

— because

'gated'

in the

—confined to my

.

.

Now, Malcolm

.

wasn't

guest of the Oxford Union. events for

him

We

'gates' after

Nelson Mandela

my guest

in

in

in

South

Oxford, he was the

whole series of But the minute he heard that I

had planned

for those four nights.

my

.

term before, I had participated

a demonstration protesting the arrest of Africa.

.

a

Mandela demonstrations, he said he wasn't going to attend any of those events either. You know, that was rather nice. ... So every night he came to my apartment during the time he was there. And that was an experience! Because [as] president of the Oxford Union [I was] sort of the center of a lot of student activities and you don't become president of the Oxford Union on a black vote. So there were lots of white friends dropping in, and so forth and so on. And Malcolm would hold forth every night during the four nights and four days he was there. ... I was was gated

for

role in the

—

sharing this apartment with Richard Fletcher

with the American Development Bank

— Richard

is

now

— and we opened the doors

between our two rooms, and sort of turned the two rooms into a

and Malcolm would sit there and talk to those white students. If there were forty students there at a time, thirty-six of them would be white. And he would talk about 'white devils' remember that phrase, 'white devils' I remember sitting there and mini-mall

.

.

.

—

—

Jan Carew

73

hearing him talk about white devils, and the white students would clap. this

I

thought that was a most remarkable experience. Here was

man

words.

talking about racial injustice, and, well, he didn't mince

If

you looked

at his

thoughts, they were not violent

thoughts, they were reasoned thoughts. But his language violent.

I

really

mean

white kids cheering

it,

this

he didn't mince words!

man who was

And

was

seeing those

talking about white oppres-

remember that very clearly. "I also remember walking with him in Oxford. We went through the Oxford Union building where there were photographs of all the previous presidents and their presidential debates, and in all those photographs, everybody taking part in those debates as was the was dressed in tails. We tradition for several hundred years would wear tails and waistcoats and white, starched formal attire. He saw all this, and it immediately dawned on him that he didn't have tails in fact, that he hadn't come to Oxford to wear tails. So I told him immediately, 'You don't have to wear tails.' I didn't tell him that I'd already raised the question with my committee and everyone had agreed to make this exception for him. He said nothing. And we walked out and about. You know, we must have walked for about twenty-five yards when he turned to me and said, sion

was

really something.

I

—

—

—

'I

really don't like

wearing

embarrassment to you thought that

in those

tails,

but

at all, I'd be

if

it's

going to be any

happy to wear

tails.' I just

days you would hardly expect anyone from

make that kind of concession. Perhaps how much he had changed since his early

the radical side of things to that

was

indicative of

days of hot gospeling.

"We

spent a lot of time discussing his relationship with Martin

Luther King and the whole

me

civil rights

movement

in

America.

He

and Martin corresponded and that they spoke to each other, but there were real differences between them, even though the differences were sincere and genuine ones. Yes, Malcolm never spoke disparagingly of him at all. He confided that even if King's approaches were right, he felt that his approach, at worse, would facilitate King's approach. I thought that was very good. "The other thing I remember is that I had a girlfriend well, not

told

that he

—

GHOSTS

74

OUR BLOOD

IN

young

exactly a girlfriend, but one of the

whom

ladies

around the Oxford

was very friendly. And she, listening to this became fascinated, hanging on every word. She came to me one night and said, 'Can we take him home tonight?' I said to her, 'Look, this is a religious man, you know.' She looked at me sort of feeling, 'Which of you can escape us?' So I allowed her to take him home, and I wasn't surprised when she came back rather speedily, sort of surprised that there was this rare Black man who turned down a beautiful woman. Which again reenforced for me, in a very small and insignificant way, I suppose, Union with

man every night, .

.

I

really

.

his integrity.

"... The

actual

defense of liberty

no

virtue.'

is

motion of the debate was 'Extremism in the no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is

This was a statement

the far right,

and

I

had adopted

"... You must understand

made by Barry Goldwater from as the motion.

it

Cambridge is the only other place that exists, and vice versa. The Oxford boat race is all about beating Cambridge, and with cricket it's the same thing. It was crucial that the president of the Oxford Union [with his chosen partner] win the debate against his Cambridge oppoBut Malcolm was not the usual nent [and bis chosen partner]. protagonist. Usually, it was someone from within a member of the House of Commons or some such individual. Ted Heath, an ex-president of the Union who later became prime minister of Britain, was going to support the president of the Cambridge Union against Malcolm and me. But at the last moment he backed off. I don't think he wanted to cross swords with us. Instead Humphrey Barkley, a Conservative member of Parliament and one who was quite liberal took on the task. I must tell you, though, I was sorry for him. I have never been as sorry for a man as I was for Humphrey Barkley that night, because Malcolm took his speech and, I mean, he just tore him up. I myself was always careful in dealing with race with people on the other side of the aisle. I didn't want to ruffle their sensibilities too much. But with Malcolm and Humphrey, it was something else. The amazing thing, though, was to see those white people standing up and cheering Malcolm X that at Oxford, .

.

.

.

.

.

—

—

—

Jan Carew as he demolished that white

75

man. You know,

Humphrey

certainly in terms of

Barkley was a popular

Oxford of those days, was a liberal Conservative. I can't remember all the players in the debate that night the main ones were Malcolm and I on one side, and Christie Davis and Humphrey Barkley on the other. Those are really my major the

Conservative, because he

—

recollections of the debate.

remember that we would talk all day walking down and about Oxford. We'd go shopping and, you know, Malcolm X never repeated himself once in those four days. And, to me, his most interesting gift was his gift of analogy. He would make a point, and then he would use an analogy to illustrate that point. His use of analogy was absolutely brilliant, and his command of the English language was something extraordinary. And to me again, and you must remember that I am of the West in Oxford, I am very impressed with Oxford and would sort of tread gently on sensibilities, but to see Oxford bend down at the knees to a Black man was remarkable, because that is what happened that week. I mean, in the Oxford Union, you are amongst the cream of the English students. It's a place where you congregate. It's not just beer cellars and libraries and so forth. Yet within four days, I mean, we had no room in my flat at night. It was like a movie house with people lined up and trying to get in. In the crowded room, six would go out and then six would come in. The overall thing is that he would speak and they would cheer. The way in which he reached people was very reasoned. It was never abusive. "I remember, too, that he was of the firm view that the American government was out to kill him. He spoke very disparagingly of "But

.

.

I

.

Elijah

Muhammad

where

his

in

terms of his

visit to

Mecca.

I

think that

is

death might have come from because, reinforced with his

Mecca, he probably would have started his own church, something much more fundamental than Muhammad in terms of

visit

to

being true to Islam.

He was

very, very preoccupied with the

possibility of his death. I'm not absolutely certain, but

tion

is

authorities

my recollec-

was more fearful of the American government than he was of Elijah Muhammad.

that he

j

GHOSTS

76

"We

I\

OIR BLOOD

discussed his role in the struggle, and he

saw

it

as critical in

terms of supporting the nonviolent groups. At that time, Martin

much the recognized Black leader, and made to paint Malcolm as some kind of

Luther King was very attempts were being lunatic extremist.

He answered

that allegation with reasoned

arguments, and that was impressive about the man.

You

didn't get

was any prejudice in him at all. I think what those English students might have sensed that his American white audiences might not have sensed that this was not a man motivated by hatred of white people. This was a man the impression that there that

is

—

who

operated at a totally cerebral

level.

You

got the feeling that

you were dealing with a very careful, scholarly man who saw clear distinctions and who could illuminate those distinctions by analogy. I had expected to meet someone who was hurt, angry, quarrelsome, bitter. This wasn't the case. He was totally cerebral, totally intellectual, and a nonemotional person."

would surprise many Black and white Americans to hear Malcolm described as "totally cerebral and totally intellectual." That, however, was how he was perceived by many who heard him debate at the Oxford Union, speak at the London School of Economics, and address audiences in France and in several African countries. The way that the Oxford Union debate was reported by the Western media, however when it was reported at all reminds me of Rashomon, that imaginative Japanese film directed by Kurosawa. In it, seven eyewitnesses give completely contradictory accounts of the same event. As the story unfolds in scene after It

—

scene,

it is

hard to believe that those eyewitnesses are talking about

same event. The BBC television, using a short excerpt from Malcolm's speech and deliberately placing it out of context, was operating very much in the Rashomon tradition. The easily forgettable witticisms of Christie Davis were highlighted and Humphrey Barkley's tepid peroration given much play. The fact is, though, that Barkley had made the mistake of calling Malcolm "North

the

America's leading exponent of apartheid" and adding insult to

77

Jan Carew injury,

he said that "Liberty to him means racial segregation."

when Malcolm demolished

Barkley paid dearly for this

and arguments with a calculated

and remorseless

his insults

logic.

The motion that was debated was, in fact, one of the more famous statements on extremism made by Barry Goldwater at the

Cow

Palace in San Francisco

when he accepted

the Republican

nomination for the American presidential election. There had been an attempt by more moderate Republicans to induce the party to

condemn

John

certain extremist right-wing groups, especially the

Birch Society, but Goldwater had brushed this aside and had given, it

seemed

at the time, a green light to these right-wing

groups that

veered close to the lunatic fringe. But subsequent events proved that Goldwater

credited

him

had greater prescience than

with.

He

foresaw the national

had more

his detractors

shift to the right

clearly than they did.

In order to discredit whatever

the

BBC

Malcolm

said during the debate,

announcers made sure to point out that among those

arguing in favor of the motion were Malcolm X, "one of the

Muslims in America," and Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish nationalist who, even more dreadful than being Black, radical, and a nationalist, had the malice to be a Communist. So Malcolm was, by implication, firmly relegated to an extremist corner. The contumacious labels were meant to intimate to the viewers that these two debaters were not to be taken seriously no matter what they said. Incidentally, Malcolm was, at the time, no

leaders of the Black

longer a Black Muslim, a point he

beginning of his speech religion

is

Islam.

and form." The

peoples,

when he

As a Muslim,

I

said, "I

very clearly at the

am

a

Muslim and my

believe in the brotherhood of all

am absolutely against discrimination in any shape or BBC commentators, however, deliberately chose to I

ignore these statements.

They wanted

portray him as a bigot.

A

their

made

cozy and

to

demonize Malcolm and

Black male truth-teller was a threat to

racist beliefs.

was still much that could be seen even on BBC. Anthony Abrahams set the tone of

Nevertheless, there edited tapes of the

the the

GHOSTS

78 debate

when he opened

not to concern

itself

his

I\

01 R BLOOD

arguments by appealing to the audience

with Goldwater, but rather to concentrate on

the matter of political principle:

"To defend that

is

born

this statement,

I

would

like to start

with a quotation

only too well known, but only too easily forgotten:

free,

but

is

now

everywhere

in chains.'

What

'Man

is

greater right

man have but his freedom? And it is my contention tonight man or any nation who seeks to deny another man or another nation of his liberty is, by definition, an extremist. He has striven to take away a man's most basic right and we must be does a

that any

extremely vicious in our reaction to such men. Because, what are the

methods they use? Which despot, which dictator ever

threat-

ened another's liberty with reason and moderation? Which nation

was ever subjugated in a gentlemanly fashion? ... A few days ago, I spoke in the Cambridge Union on the use of violence in South Africa. On that occasion, the argument which the moderates advanced was simply this: Think about the innocent women and children in South Africa.'

we have

It is

my

contention that this

is

the price

'What about the innocent women and children in Nazi Germany?' Britain couldn't even ask, 'What about the women and children of this country?' The oppressor uses force and understands nothing else. ... If we are afraid to meet oppression with extreme action, then we will .

.

to

pay

for liberty. Britain didn't ask,

.

be oppressed.

freedom.

.

.

.

We

we fought to enslaved if we falter."

are free because

Tomorrow we

will be

protect our

Abrahams, Malcolm, and MacDiarmid were, in fact, taking the Goldwater quote and using it in a fashion that its author could never possibly have imagined Palace.

turned

Goldwater had used it

around and used

racism for

all

it

it

when he trumpeted

it

at the

Cow

to endorse white bigotry, while they

in defense of liberty

and freedom from

people.

MacDiarmid began by lampooning

the "doctrine of moderation

and declaring that "it was the most abominable, antivital doctrine that was ever promulgated in the history of mankind." He followed up this opening salvo with the William in all things"

Jan Carew

79

Blake dictum that "The road to excess leads to the Palace of

Wisdom"

and, in a more serious vein, declared, "I

know no

movement that has been won without a terrible struggle, without civil disobedience, violence, war or civil war." This heretical Scotsman then threw in a number of quotes from Mao Tse-tung: "What is the strength of the imperialists? It lies only in the unconsciousness of the people" and "Humanity is in its infancy. When it is full grown, what will it make of our world?" national liberation

But after ruminating over the arguments of those for and those against the motion,

I

all

the speakers,

always return to Mal-

colm's eloquent and unequivocal advocacy of a genuine racial

democracy, for ring to

it

it

continues to have an authentic and contemporary

after thirty years. In retrospect, the

opposition to

Malcolm merely provide

arguments raised

in

us with an entertaining

discourse.

Oxford Union debate Malcolm, with and aplomb, slipped in a quotation from Hamlet's time-

At the end of subtlety less

his historic

soliloquy to reinforce his concluding arguments.

He

intro-

duced the quotation by saying that Hamlet, when he launched

was apparently reluctant to make up his which the audience laughed heartily. But when the laughter died down, Malcolm's mood changed from a bemused jocularity to a somber earnestness. He made it quite clear what he meant by the terms moderation on the one hand and extremism on the other, and he did this by adding his own comments to

himself into this soliloquy,

mind,

at

Shakespeare's passage:

To be or not to be

—that

is

the question

y

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [moderation]

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them [extremism]. on in that soliloquy, one finds much else that touched on Malcolm's imminent death at the hands of assassins: Ironically, further

GHOSTS

80 For

who would

I\

01 R BLOOD

bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud mans contumely .

.

.

the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes.

Malcolm was aware decided to

kill

and malevolent enemies had him. He understood more profoundly than most that powerful

that with the ferment in the ghettos,

on the

streets,

and on the

campuses, a decision had been made by senior policymakers

Washington

to discredit,

buy

off,

imprison, or

kill

in

progressive

and to substitute the pimps, drug dealers, and gangsters as role models for the young. Because of this, Malcolm was determined to denounce racism, trumpet a message of Black pride, and affirm as an Afro-Carib shaman had leaders, particularly those of color,

done that

"all peoples

have a right to share the waters of the River

own cups, but our cups have been broken." Malcolm insisted that we not only have to mend our broken cups, but that we have to have a say in how the waters of

of Life, and to drink with their

the River of Life should be shared.

FIVE But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No

traveller returns, puzzles the will

.

.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

Malcolm was

pensive for a while.

Then he

said,

"You know,

get into the strangest discussions with you. Usually,

I

I

just

don't have the time for exchanges like this."

"Maybe

flu

never islanded you in a hotel

country before,"

I

pointed out. As

conversations could take us

down

room

in a foreign

to underline the fact that our

if

unusual intellectual paths, he

said:

that Hamlet guy. Read and learned whole passages by heart." why you ended your Oxford Union debate with 'To

"I liked the

way Shakespeare portrayed

the play in prison,

"So

that's

be or not to be, that

is

the question.

"You remember?" He seemed

' .

.

"

.

genuinely surprised and pleased.

"The Malcolm X that the press portrays is hardly one who would quote Shakespeare so aptly," I said. "Tony Abrahams told me afterwards that it really shocked them when I laid that quotation on them," he said with a mischievous grin.

"To I

use a British understatement,

said.

81

I,

too,

was mildly

surprised,"

GHOSTS

82

01 R

IN

BLOOD

"That Hamlet guy was really mixed up. He couldn't make up his mind about some things, but he loved his father and never forgave his

mother

for betraying

with the uncle," he

him and then jumping

right into marriage

said.

"The fellow sounded too good to be true," I said, because Malcolm had looked away from me and seemed to be mulling over sad and private thoughts.

"Who, Hamlet?"

he asked absentmindedly.

The fellow was so perfect that his wife obviously began to find him a bit of a bore, and when the fun-loving and unscrupulous uncle came along, she fell for his line of sweet talk. Now Hamlet, on the other hand, was in love not with a flesh-andblood mother but with a perfect being he had created in his imagination, and when he saw her having a ball with his raunchy "No,

his father.

uncle, jealousy began to

gnaw

There was an awkward

at his guts."

silence,

somewhat good-naturedly,

which he broke by returning, of ancestral links

the issue

to

confessing that the Chinese and Arabs he'd met had also

about "It

by

asked him

his family history.

took

were not

me

really was.

a while," he confessed ruefully, "to realize that they

making

just

I'll

polite small talk, but trying to find out

start digging into the family history as

who

I

soon as I'm

back home," he promised.

"You should

begin with your mother,"

proverb says that

women

I

suggested,

"A

Chinese

hold up half the sky."

and I sensed that he was talking about much more than the immediate topic. "I

"

need time," Malcolm

To be or not to be,'

"

I

said,

"When a man is pulled in Russians, who are a very literary

said jokingly.

several directions by doubts, the

people, say that he's suffering from Hamletism."

"In short, you're implying that that's

my complaint?"

"Perhaps."

"But

I've

already

made up my mind. You

see,

you have the

option of staying here and spinning out theories, and all

honesty that

I

I

can't say in

don't envy you. Those four and a half days at

Oxford were more stimulating

intellectually than anything

I

had

Jan Carew experienced on the street or in

good and bad,

that

locked-away, mind-blinkered

was the sum total of all my experimade the Oxford one so stimulating. If I

Black Muslim period. But ences,

my

83

it

stayed there too long, I'd just dry up and wither away. So I've got to

go back to a brutal,

how

racist

country where our folks have to learn

to organize for self-defense.

The theory has

to be part of that

would be that you mean well with all this talk about ancestors and roots, and what did you call it? Hamletism? You're telling me in so many words that I shouldn't go back right now. But I've made up my mind, and I'm going back," he said, facing me. "All right," I said, looking him in the eye, "the real issue is this: struggle or else

can

taste

it,

I

like froth that

it

disappears before you

know

our ancestors survived because there were those to live for the struggle,

who were

and those who were ready

willing

to die for

it.

I'm

suggesting that you should seriously consider the option of living for the struggle, going into hiding, writing, studying, evolving ....

I'm certain that you'll never

sell

out .... Before the Harpers Ferry

John Brown had a secret meeting with Frederick Douglass and pleaded with him to call for a general slave uprising. But if Douglass had done this, he'd have been a martyr, and after the raid,

bloodbath the Black struggle would've been held

in

check for at

least fifty years."

"Who knows? The hundred years before, I've

made

it

if

Black struggle might have advanced a

he'd called for that uprising.

made up my mind," he

said,

Anyway,

and the

like

I

said

finality in his voice

clear that he wasn't prepared to discuss the matter

any

further.

He

me and said thoughtfully, "My mind was when I was under Elijah Muhammad's influence. I was like

looked away from

closed

my mind's wide awake now. And it's not just Elijah Muhammad, but white America that blinkers our minds. During my African visits, I talked to President a sleepwalker for twelve years, but

Nasser, President Nyerere, President Kenyatta, President Azikiwe,

Ben all

Nkrumah,

President Sekou Toure, and Prime Minister and there are others whose names I can't mention. They shared some of their valuable time with me to discuss the plight

President

Bella,

GHOSTS

84

IN 01

R BLOOD

of Negroes in America and to talk about colonialism, racism, and the need for unity of the world's oppressed peoples.

them bought the

State

being talking

of

Department propaganda about American

Negroes being content with didn't for one

Not one

their lot as second-class citizens.

I

moment flatter myself that I was some kind of special to them, because I knew that through me they were

expressing their solidarity with the twenty-two million oppressed

Negroes

in

America. So they spent hours talking to me. Those talks

broadened

my outlook and made it crystal clear to me that had to I

look at the struggle in America's ghettos against the background of a

worldwide struggle of oppressed peoples. That's why,

one of

my trips

abroad, America's rulers see

more dangerous. That's why

me have

I

feel in

me

after every

as being more and

my bones that the plots to kill

already been hatched in high places.

The triggermen

will

only be doing what they were paid to do."

him and observing him as he moved restlessly around his hotel room, it occurred to me that during this visit to Britain he had become more aware of how others saw him. Realizing how intense he must have appeared, Malcolm occasionally paused, smiled, and relaxed. It was during one of these pauses that I steered our talk away from the morbid subject of the threats to his life and said, "The Ejaus of the Niger say that journeys to far places help to scrape you down to the simplest common denominator of what you really are as a human being." Listening to

"Scraping, huh? falling

My

from people's

father used to preach about the scales

eyes, but that African scraping deals with the

whole body. Can you imagine our Toms being scraped down to the simplest common denominator of what they really are as human beings?" he asked rhetorically. "It would turn them into jellyfish, because it's only the crusts that are holding them up." After reflecting for a while, he asked, "Look, why not tell me more about yourself?

"Well, I

How is I

it

that

you survived

suppose the scraping

go around taking

"And you

it

this scraping?"

down

for granted that

I

didn't turn

me

jelly,

so

have a right to be here."

said that you're married to an English

upper-class one?"

into

woman, an

85

Jan Caren

my

army colonel when I met her, and she had three children by him, and now she has a fourth by me. You met my daughter at the reception, remember?" He acknowledged that he had with a nod and a smile, and I continued, "You see, in my Guyanese culture, if you fall in love with a woman and she has children, then it's natural as breathing to marry the woman and take her children under your wing as if they were your own." "That's right,

He laughed

wife

was married

to an

out loud, stood up, stretched, and, shaking his head,

you have problems. A white woman and her white children plus one of your own! In the States, rednecks would've tried to lynch you or bomb your house, and if that didn't And what does the work, they'd hound you down in the courts. declared, "Brother Jan,

.

colonel think of

all

"He's from the

.

.

this?" Scottish-Irish nobility.

And

professional soldiers and empire builders before him. in their footsteps for a while,

were

his ancestors

He

followed

but he resigned from the army

when

they started 'planning to fight a nuclear war.' He's a decent chap,

one of those rare individuals who, despite being trained to be a racist

from

birth, isn't a racist.

Race doesn't bother him,

as the

Ghana say, at-all at-all." "And what about your friends?" "What about them?"

folks in

"Didn't any of them turn against you after you married a white

woman?"

"My

my

mother does. She wrote saying that she was glad that I was getting married and settling down, but friends don't mind, but

couldn't

I

family she bring

my

knew? She added

that she

hoped

English wife back to Guyana.

and worked all

woman from home whose

have married a nice young

in the States for years, she

You

I

wasn't planning to

see, after

having lived

has an abiding suspicion of

white people. She divides them into three categories: those

act white

—the

majority; a small minority

who

racism everywhere around them act like normal, decent beings; then there are the rabid racists,

human

beasts.

As

for

my friends,

whom

intermarriage

is

who

in spite of the

human

she describes as old hat. Since the

GHOSTS

86

become

IN

OUR BLOOD

commonplace. Sometimes the it. There's a racist myth that every Black man has a magical sugar stick between his legs. The word is out on the gossip-gram over here that J. Edgar Hoover's obsessed with this myth of the black super-stud. I heard this from a Negro journalist who was on the Washington beat. But isn't that the archetypal myth that's lodged in the mind of every white male, and the American white male in particular? And many white women believe it, too, while all too many Negro men try to live up to it. White racism credits us with having phenomenal end of the war,

it's

pretty

racism encourages rather than discourages

sexual prowess, but

it

doesn't credit us with having

way of intelligence." "And what about your "She

lost a couple,

much

in the

wife's friends?"

but of the ones

few of them wanted to find out

if

who remained

her friends, a

sleeping with a Black

man

did,

indeed, bring magical sexual delights. Every time she turned her

myth with me. My wife's father, though, is a white settler in Kenya, and he refused to have anything to do with her. But, then again, she was a rape-child. Her mother hated her, and she hated her mother right back. As for her father, during her entire adult life she must have seen him only half back, one of them tried to explore that

a

dozen times." "This

is

a strange place,"

U.S. cities, the I

raw

explained further

"At

in Britain:

Malcolm

insides, but,

first,

why

if

said. "I've seen the insides of

anything, London's worse."

intermarriage wasn't anything unusual

the immigrants were mostly male, but the

gender thing became more balanced from the early 1950s onward.

When

I

first

came

to Britain,

women

of color were, as

we

say in

Guyana, scarcer than good gold." "The situation here is different," Malcolm acknowledged once more, and

I

continued:

"Something that most people don't

had an empire on which the sun never

realize set,

is

this: yes,

the British

and although thousands

of Britons fanned out to populate their empire, most of them stayed at

home and

picket fences

lived both physically and mentally surrounded by and brick walls and hedges. Our ancestors didn't

87

Jan Carew travel of their

own

free will either, after that first, forced Atlantic

So when we

mother country by the thousands, white, stay-at-home Britons began having permanent, swarthy next-door neighbors in large numbers for the first crossing.

time.

And

started immigrating to the

with the loss of empire and the realization that British

is

no longer best, unprincipled politicians have begun to use us as ready-made scapegoats." "You folks had better get your act together. Right now you have conversation, dialogue, but soon there'll be aggression, and when it reaches that stage, you're going to have to be ready and able to defend yourselves. You can take my word for it, law won't defend you," Malcolm warned.

"The aggression stage is already upon us, man, but it will take a long time and almost unbearable racist pressures for our dark million to realize that they must unite and link up with Black and other Third World peoples all over the world," I cautioned. "Then you'd better get to work right away." "That's what we're trying to do with Magnet. Garvey said that first we must change our way of thinking, and then, peacefully, fashion the weapons with which to fight, and we're trying to follow that Garveyite advice. That's the only

way we can

survive with

dignity as a people."

"Those are good points," Malcolm declared, nodding his approval, "and I like that part about peacefully fashioning the weapons to fight with! That's good advice."

"You know, when it comes to race relations, the British are even more arrogant and ignorant than the most benighted white Americans. In their heart of hearts, they'd like to see every man, woman, and child of color dispatched to some faraway limbo-land. The American whites, in the midst of their virulent race baiting, know in their bones that they need to have Blacks around. Without those Black-white hatreds to generate a certain kind of energy deep inside that nation's guts, the United States terrible sense of emptiness.

tion of

women, and

would

suffer

from a

Racism, the oppression and degrada-

multiple ethnic hatreds provide the glue that

holds the aggressive, white, male-dominated, profit-hungry ruling

GHOSTS

88

America together.

sectors of

01 R BLOOD

IN

always remember

I

that Russian medical doctor turned writer,

saw

tion through sharply focused creative lenses

mankind

—

how Chekhov, human condi-

the

when he wrote

take note, he didn't say 'womankind'

—

is

more

that

easily

united by hatred, malice, greed, and envy than by ideas of love,

and compassion. The growing racism

charity,

Europe

in Britain and same breath, as I black-white conversation below the waist is

proof of

living

is

mentioned before,

easier in these parts than

But, in the

this.

in

it is

America.

could've solved the race question here,

black-white copulation

If it

would've done so long

ago. But there's another side of the business of miscegenation that

Wherever the British and European males landed during the age of exploration and colonization, nine months later there were children of mixed races born to native

the whites never like to look

And

mothers.

with every corner of the earth being so easily

accessible these days, the

Here

creased.

at.

tempo of

in Britain, interracial sex

mixing has

in-

common, and

it's

interracial is

pretty

been taking place since the time of Elizabeth

the Virgin Queen.

I,

She got so upset about the sizable Black population

in

England that

Then more West Indian,

she passed an anti-Black immigration law.

recently,

during the two world wars, thousands of

African,

Afro-American, and colored Commonwealth servicemen and

women

helped to increase the mixed-race population."

Malcolm brought me back

to the story of

my life

in Britain

when

he asked with an amused insistence, "So what about this English colonel, the one

you were "Stole

still is

on

whose wife you

—"

word some woo

not the right

"All right, pitched

"Yes, the colonel and

I

"Before

I

is

different here,"

went on

to the race.

I

I

hear you say that

my

I

at

chided him, and he recanted.

and married."

are friends. Relations between us have

always been pretty cordial. After "It sure

stole? Didn't

friendly terms?"

all,

I

had custody of his children."

Malcolm acknowledged

travels, I'd

ruefully.

have denounced you as a traitor

might not even have believed your story, because

wouldn't have wanted to believe

"Which race?"

I

I

it."

asked facetiouslv, "because here

in

Britain

Jan Carew Black could

mean

Black, brown, or yellow

89

—West Indian, African,

or Asian."

"In America, Black means Negro, a person of color

who

speaks

A friend of mine and used a phony accent, and he was accepted in circles in Georgia and Alabama. It can confuse an

with a Black southern accent or an inner-city one.

wore

a turban

lily-white

man

outsider

who

plays

kinds of mind games on us. In the midst of lynching and

all

hears about this kind of thing, but the white

brutalizing us, he has

still

persuaded most of us that U.S. Blacks are

superior to you King George Negroes or anyone else of color for that matter."

do that everywhere. First they overwhelm us with their white, male symbols," I concurred, "then they play divide-and-rule games with us. They sell us the idea of a white God, a white Jesus, the West on top, the rest of us below! The white king is dead, long live the white queen! Right now, it's different here, different in many ways from the U.S. While interracial marriage may be easier and less hazardous here, the job situation is where it

"The

was

imperialists

in the U.S. at the

beginning of this century.

And the way things

look at the moment, the British seem hell-bent on moving back-

wards into the future where race relations are concerned." There was a pause in our conversation until I broke the silence and put into words the questions I had been eager to ask earlier. "I keep reading about a new Malcolm X, a transformed El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a man whose worldview was drastically changed after a pilgrimage to Mecca. You see, the man who came

months ago and took part in the debate at the Oxford Union and the one facing me right now is the only Malcolm we know. Is this one really a new Malcolm X?" "No. I'm one and the same person, the son of a mother and father who were devoted Garveyites all of their lives. The son of a father who was murdered and a mother who was mentally crucified by racists. I'm carrying on the work they started, just as my children will carry on my work when I am gone. Before they carted my mother off to a mental hospital and tore our family apart, she kept telling us that without an education we'd be like people

to Britain three

GHOSTS

90

blindfolded in a forest

IN

01 R BLOOD

pockmarked with quicksand. I strayed from I came back, didn't I? My

those teachings of hers for years, but

vision of the struggle has been broadened, that's true, but

my

basic

commitment is the same. Is racism dead and buried? Can I trust the white American any more than I did before? Are white liberals less treacherous than they were before?"

"But some of your views have changed,"

I

insisted.

"Shouldn't that be a natural part of everybody's intellectual

growing up?" he demanded sharply.

"Take your views on interracial marriage, for example," I continued. "I read that you were totally against it, and here I am telling you about my English wife and English stepchildren and you laugh it off. I told you earlier about my great-gran's theory about the mixture of ghosts in our blood, and you took that in your stride too. All these polyglot bloods, however we came by them, are as much a part of us as our white and red corpuscles "But the only blood relations who would welcome you, accept you as one of their own, are the Blacks and the Indians. The others would regard you as an embarrassment they'd rather not face," he said, raising his voice. Then he continued to expound, as though speaking to a large gathering, "A month ago, when I was in Canada, I made my views on interracial marriage crystal clear. I said that it was just a matter of one human being marrying another, and it's only the white man's hostility that blows it up into such a big deal." He paused and then continued, "Your daughter

—

what's her

name again?"

I call her Liza. I named her after the character in Queen of Spades. It's strange, when I took her to the Union and we were driving across the country, the Russians

"Lizaveta, but

Pushkin's Soviet

kept saying that she looked like Pushkin's daughter."

grow up

Negro or English?" the shrewd Malcolm asked, because he knew from his mother's experience that balanced in an uneasy equipoise between Black and white, if you tried to deny your Black blood, there was always a heavy "But

will she

to be

psychological price to pay. "If she chooses to be English, she'd

have to deny

my

existence

Jan Carew

91

and that of all of my ancestors, and that denial would haunt her

for

the rest of her days."

Malcolm nodded

soberly and looked

away

for a

few seconds.

said, "The little bit of walking around done with you sure was an eye-opener."

Then, turning back to me, he

London

that I've

"How do

you mean?" "You're an arrogant Negro," he said with a wide

grin.

"Arrogant?" "Yes,

I

noticed the same thing with

"We come from

Tony Abrahams."

small places, where we're in the majority.

home, we know who we away that certainty of knowing."

time

we

leave

are,

By the

and nobody can take

SIX Africa

I

have kept your memory Africa

you are inside

me

Like the splinter in the like the .

.

.

we proclaim

and the

wound

guardian fetish

in the

center of the village

the oneness of the suffering

revolt

of all the peoples on all the face of the earth

and we mix the mortar of the age of brotherhood out of the dust of idols.

—Jacques Roumain, "Bois-d'Ebene"

The same heart, the same pulse that beats

man on

the African continent today

heart of the Black

man

in

America, South America, and

them don't know

it,

—Malcolm

but X,

it's

is

in the

beating

Black in

the

North America, Central in

the Caribbean.

Many

of

true.

London School

of Economics,

February 11, 1965

M

alcolm was due to speak don School of Economics

at the

Old Theatre at the Lonand he looked

in a short while,

93

GHOSTS

94

IN 01

R BLOOD

Dermot Hussey had joined were desultory exchanges as Malcolm got ready. I said

decidedly better as the time drew near. us and there

jokingly, "We'll act as your bodyguards," but he did not respond.

As we watched Malcolm getting dressed, it struck me again that, somehow, no one had ever captured what he really looked like. It was easier to match iridescent colors in a kaleidoscope than to capture the real persona of this remarkable man.

It

would

forever

elude the bright lights, the television cameras, the swift, incandescent flare of flashbulbs. of him, the seen.

And

I

more

And

as for artists trying to paint portraits

the artists watched, the less they appeared to have

thought:

"They say that not even the most gifted

of their time could

artists

capture a reasonable likeness of Ignatius Loyola on a canvas or in

Malcolm

—

X

and Loyola five centuries separate them and how different one is from the other but they have this in common: no one will ever know what Loyola looked like, and no one who didn't see Malcolm in the flesh will ever know what he really stone.

looked

—

like."

When we were

about to leave the

hotel, he said, "It

if we didn't leave together." "Of course we'll leave together," Dermot and

would be

better

same "I

I

protested at the

time.

can be gunned

down

at

any time," he said with

a

furrowed

brow.

We said nothing, hotel lobby

But

but

we walked on

either side of

and into the narrow, bustling

at that

moment

too,

I,

felt

him across

the

street.

hunted and surrounded by

omnipotent and cruel eyes watching our every move and by

on our every word. In the midst of a was sure Mantop had drawn so close

electronic ears eavesdropping

sudden bout of paranoia, that his breath at

I

was almost touching our

Malcolm, and

in the pale light of a

faces.

I

glanced sideways

winter afternoon he seemed

was going on around him. I looked straight ahead. The shapes and forms around me, the muted colors and the noise of traffic made me want to flee to the sanctuary of my Wimbledon house.

to be taking in everything that

Jan Carew

95

It occurred to me, too, as it had never done before, that I usually went about my business in this city wrapped up in my own thoughts and barely noticing my surroundings. I told myself, "Anonymity definitely has advantages." Then I wondered, "What would it be like to live the rest of my life under the scrutiny of those eyes? Malcolm," I reminded myself, "has lived under surveillance

now

so long that he Bois said,

is

takes

for granted. Eurocentric history,

it

Du

that of the hunter writing about the lion. Well,

Malcolm's a simba who's speaking back, and because of

this the

white hunters and their Black gun carriers, trackers, and house

boys are out to bag him."

As we walked toward my car, he said casually, "They warned me that England was cold, and it is." He adjusted his Astrakhan hat and buttoned his coat. But I noticed that despite his easy, bantering tone, he trusted no one at that moment, for he knew in his bones that those tracking him down had eyes and ears in every corner of the earth. I

thought that we'd become very close, but out there on the cold

and impersonal London

chasm opened between

streets a

us.

I

that neither the adulation of thousands nor the devotion of

who were willing

to die for

him would have been enough

to

knew many

fill

the

void of loneliness surrounding him. For in the midst of fighting for the dark millions in Africa

and the Americas, he was

in

danger of

being transformed into a black version of that Dostoyevskian character

who

human

loved the

bear to have another person in a

As we

settled into

my car,

I

race so

much

that he could not

room with him

for long.

bridged an uncomfortable silence by

talking about the weather.

"When you

first

cutes you, goads

come

you to

here, the weather torments you, perse-

despair,

and

dries

your dark skin

until

it

looks like an ashen alligator's. But you have to psych yourself up to

go outdoors and

you

fight the cold.

step outside your front

You

tell

yourself every morning as

door that you have to

fight against

millions of prejudiced English people plus thousands of

Indian,

Indian,

Pakistani,

middle-class aspirants

African, and other

who have

West

Commonwealth

been wearing white masks so long

GHOSTS

96 that they can't take

them

off.

IN

01 R BLOOD

Then you boast

to yourself that the

sun's in your blood, that you've inherited an invincible heart

ancestors,

and that

afternoon, you

still

in spite of the

darkness that comes

from

in the

keep seeing the bluest skies and the brightest

suns in your mind's eye."

"Toms who wear white masks for so long that they can't show their real faces anymore!" He laughed out loud, and the chasm that had opened between us was narrowed by that laughter. I parked on Norfolk Street and as we walked toward Aldwych and the London School of Economics, I pointed out the West India

Committee building, Fleet Street, the BBC Bush House, the Indian High Commission, and the theater district. "This whole area is where the past and the present collide. There's the West India Committee where the sugar barons had their headquarters. They made the deals to buy and sell millions of our ancestors, to scatter them across a hemisphere, and often to work them to death on plantations, but they themselves were careful never to touch the money while it was still slippery with our blood. By the time it reached them, it was laundered and perfumed." "Tell they're

me more about those students I'm about liberal, but how liberal are they?"

"They're liberal but

when

it

all right,

comes

to face. Folks say

staunchly antiwar and antiapartheid,

to doing something concrete about racial

discrimination here in Britain, they'll go into an intellectual orbit

and

you'll

need a telescope to locate their position.

kind of radical noises they

make

at the

No matter what

LSE, they're aspirants to the

and with the empire dwindling, they're afraid that fewer and fewer of them will actually make it. Their left-wing British ruling class,

posturing

is

merely a

their irreverence

way

and

of being noticed. They're also noted for

their ability to rile a speaker with loaded

questions."

He

and then he said, "There's no crowd that's more irreverent than a Harlem one. If you can get by as a speaker in Harlem you can make it anywhere." listened intently

97

Jan Carew

There were reporters waiting to question Malcolm as he, Dermot,

were greeted by the sponsors of his talk at the main entrance of the London School of Economics. Malcolm parried the questions deftly, smiled, and moved on. A persistent reporter, tagging

and

I

along behind us, asked, "Mr. X, have you ever been mistaken for a

white

man

in

any of the countries you visited?" Malcolm paused,

faced him, and replied, "No, sir."

you know of such

know many right

a country, please write

middle-class Negroes

A ripple

away."

Then he added and

a rider:

tell

who would book

"But

me about

it.

if I

passages there

of laughter trailed after him.

home in the grayness of the early morning when fog I had clung to the Wimbledon Common as if it had dug sharp claws into the flesh of the earth. How many hours had I spent with Malcolm? It seemed as if time had been standing still because, by the time we left

reached the LSE, the gray morning and the gray, somber afternoon

looked the same.

While we were waiting backstage

in the

Old Theatre,

I

peered

through the curtain and reported, "The room's packed. Students are sitting in the aisles. After your triumph at Oxford, you're a hit

with these university types." "I like the intellectual give-and-take at universities, but

stop seeing the big picture through the eyes of For, after

Nothing all

all

will

my

travels,

make me

Harlem's

my

my

I'll

never

folk in Harlem.

take-off spot

forget the suffering of our folk

on

this earth.

who endured

kinds of punishment for no reason other than that they have

No

and no matter if I'm a Muslim, I'll keep on keeping on in this struggle." He didn't elaborate further, and we said nothing. We knew that he was gearing himself to face an audience once again. I wanted to tell him that at home, we call it "beating your own drum and dancing." What happens is that when a virtuoso on the drums is about to face an audience, he does a backstage warm-up. The head of the African Student Society came and told Malcolm that everything was ready for his appearance. He parted the curtain and, amidst loud applause, walked to the podium. black skins.

matter where

I

go,

Christian, Hindu, atheist, or agnostic,

GHOSTS

98

From behind

the curtain,

various shades of

brown

I

IN

OUR BLOOD

could see the white, black, yellow, and

faces looking

exotic touch to the gathering

was

up

at

him, and adding an

a sprinkling of turbaned heads

The murmurs that rose and fell after the applause died down were like waves climbing and retreating up and down a beach at ebb tide. The audience expected an ebony Savonarola, and what they saw instead was a tall, like night

orchids blooming in the daytime.

elegant, light-skinned

Afro-American with gray-green eyes that

appraised them coolly from behind rimless spectacles.

What was significant about this and other forums at which Malcolm spoke in Britain and France was that African students were the principal organizers. Everywhere that he had gone in Africa, young people had come in the hundreds to hear him speak,

and the news about

his

bold and stirring

call for a transatlantic

Black unity had, very quickly, reached the African students

abroad. Then, of course, there were both Black and white students

who were

anxious to see the

man whom

the

news media had

transformed into a demon-celebrity.

"Malcolm's a

man

hoarsely. "He's like a

living life in a hurry,"

Dermot commented

comet burning himself out to

light

up our

Black world."

when asked by a white Malcolm, explained, why he admired editor after Malcolm's death "Malcolm kept snatching our lies away. He kept shouting the painful truth we whites and Blacks did not want to hear from all the housetops. And he wouldn't stop for love or money." Ossie Davis, that splendid Black actor,

Ted Joans, the African-American jazz poet, captured the essence of what Malcolm was in his most fiery days when he wrote: Malcolm screamed at them but be spoke softly to me.

Malcolm stripped tbem naked but he clothed me.

Yet privately, Malcolm, even at the height of period,

was

his

the epitome of courtly manners, of

"white devil"

charm and an

Jan Carew

99

His parents had taught him those good

innate graciousness.

manners when he was

a child,

and when he became

a

Muslim

minister those teachings reasserted themselves. Sitting in the

packed room

and waiting reverently

for

London School of Economics Malcolm to appear was Michael De at the

Freitas. He would later call himself Michael X and claim that he had been chosen by Malcolm X to be his leading apostle in Britain. The only thing that Michael had in common with Malcolm, however, was that they had both begun as outlaws in their respective societies, but here the comparison has to end abruptly. For once Malcolm became a Muslim and dedicated his life to the cause of Black liberation, his personal life was austere, ascetic, and morally irreproachable. Besides, Malcolm, during and after serving time in prison, had a passion for books and ideas. Michael, in contrast, remained a creature of instinct, and listening to his antiracist pronouncements, even when they were, at times, right on target, one was left with an uneasy feeling as a certain obscurantism crept into the rest of what he had to say. As for his claim to being a Muslim convert, he in fact never abided by any of the austere tenets that the Koran prescribes. Instead, he proclaimed

movement that eventually turned out more shadow than substance. He was, however, not without ability, charm, intelligence, and a West Indian sense of loyalty to his friends. In fact, he became a leader by default, for in the absence of militant, fearless, eloquent, and incorruptible grassroots leaders like Malcolm X, and without a movement like Elijah Muham-

himself to be the leader of a to be

mad's Black Muslims, Michael

X

did help to dramatize the plight

of immigrants of color in Britain and to prod a reluctant British

government into taking halfhearted steps to deal with

racial

discrimination.

Michael X, with

his

complexion, looked

dark prophet's beard highlighting a sallow

like

one of those millenarian prophet-priests

that oppressed Black societies occasionally

and Mackandal

throw up

—Boukman

Bedward in Jamaica, Jordan in Guyana, Arpeika the Black/Seminole shaman in Florida, and others. What

Malcolm

X

in Haiti,

and

his

transatlantic imitator Michael

X

had

in

GHOSTS

100

common was

IN 01

R BLOOD

an inner rage against white oppression.

rage, burning like a flame in secret

chambers of

And

this

their hearts, lent a

mysterious aura of reined-in power to their personalities. Michael

X, enthralled by every word that Malcolm uttered meeting, told set

up

me

at that

LSE

afterward that he had decided there and then to

a Black nationalist

movement

in Britain.

Malcolm began to speak after an introductory encomium in which he was described as a Joshua, a redeemer, and the most eloquent spokesman for oppressed Black peoples since Marcus Garvey. The heightened murmur of voices that greeted his appearance subsided, and he seemed to grow taller under the harsh lights. No one could have guessed that earlier in the day he'd been afflicted with flu and that stomach cramps and chills had left him looking crumpled and wretched. With the exception of a handful

most of those present were seeing Malcolm in the flesh for time. Supporters, detractors, and the curious had come to see a Black messianic nemesis figure whom a hostile media had created. To their surprise, what they saw instead was a smiling, supremely confident humanitarian who greeted them graciously and accorded them a respect that their professors seldom did, and this immediately erased the distorted media images from their minds. He thanked the Africa Society for inviting him and said that of us,

the

first

he had been told that students at the LSE were smart, enlightened,

and noted

for giving controversial speakers like himself a hard

time. "I look forward to the verbal contests that will ensue after

speak," he assured them.

He seemed

he continued, but his talk was, in

I

to be speaking off the cuff as

fact, structured

and balanced,

interrelated. and the wide range of themes he touched on were Malcolm carried the American racial situation with him wherever he went. He saw the world through a spectrum of America's all

inner

cities.

His world was one shaped by his experiences

inner

cities,

particularly in Harlem.

It

was

in

Harlem

the extended family that had been denied him

growing up. ing that

It

was

there that he

was given

in those

that he found

when

he was

the love and understand-

he had needed so desperately during the turbulent,

formative decades after his father's tragic death. The

women

in

Jan Carew

101

Harlem, Black and West Indian alike, became collective surrogate mothers, and it was through them that he could once again acknowledge Louise, the mother he had shut out of his life.

Whether he was in Cairo, London, Paris, Accra, Nairobi, or Dar Salaam, he was always speaking to the world from a platform

es

in

Harlem.

The opening themes he touched on

in his talk at the

LSE were

loaded with coded messages to his grassroots constituents in America's inner cities. The media had noised it everywhere that he

had "changed"; that after his pilgrimage to Mecca he no longer denounced whites as devils; that he had abandoned Elijah Muhammad's Manichean doctrines. The underlying suggestion in these rumors was that somehow he had "sold out" and betrayed his "gullible" followers. The grassroots folk were accustomed to hot gospelers of Black revolution assailing the citadels of white, male

power with incendiary words and

then, in a thrice, being co-opted,

neutralized, silenced, or killed. But they trusted others.

He had an

Malcolm above

all

inner ear for their resentments, hopes, and

life, and for a world free from the racial contempt that had been foisted on the backs of slave ancestors and then on theirs. He was more in tune with the secret rhythms of their

longings for a better

lives

than any Black leader had been since Marcus Garvey.

So speaking to that sophisticated audience at the LSE, he was also sending messages to calm the fears and apprehensions of his inner-city devotees.

He knew and

they

knew

that the

automatically misconstrue his words, quote

media would

him out of

context,

and attribute the basest of motives to his deeds, but they were skilled at reading

dos,

and drawing

between the their

own

lines,

ignoring the

sly, racist

innuen-

conclusions.

The enthralled listeners at the LSE did not realize that Malcolm was at once speaking to them and to a transatlantic audience. He explained that he was now an orthodox Muslim and that his religion taught brotherhood. He no longer judged people by the color of their skin, but, he added, "I have to be a realist

America, a society which does not believe sense of the term. ...

It is

in

—

I

brotherhood

live in

in

any

a racist society ruled by segregationists."

GHOSTS

102

IN

01 R BLOOD

This harsh and unequivocal statement was addressed to his

He was

followers back home.

condition remained as truth about

it

reassuring

them

that so long as their

was, he would continue to

it

out the

spell

with his down-to-earth metaphors and his trumpet

calls for resistance:

"We

are not for violence in any shape or form,

but believe that the people

who

have violence committed against

them should be able to defend themselves." This was a point he emphasized in every one of his major public speeches, but here at the LSE, he elaborated on it: "I have never said that

but

Negroes should

initiate acts of

when the government

fails

aggression against whites,

to protect the

Negro he

is

entitled to

do it himself." While sending coded messages home, he was also warning the

new immigrants societies, they

of color in Britain that in white-dominated

should never rely entirely on laws and statutes for

their protection

from racism; that when the agencies of the

run by

racists,

then laws will inevitably be perverted; that being

vigilant

and organizing

and communities

is

state are

to defend the rights of individuals, families,

absolutely essential. "Don't wait until they're

getting ready to send

you

to the ovens," he

warned again and

again.

and telling harsh, unvarpredominantly white audi-

In the midst of issuing dire warnings

nished truths, however, he

ence at the

LSE

utter sincerity,

feel at ease.

and the

elegantly turned-out

made

this

His body language,

his charisma, his

glittering intelligence this

man

handsome and

projected was such that no one

audience could possibly have

felt

threatened.

He was

in that

at times

and occasionally his wit flashed like a mirror twisted in the At one point, when he was noting a glaring contradiction in U.S foreign policy, he declared, "I come from a country that is busily sending the Peace Corps to Nigeria while sending hired acerbic,

sunlight.

Congo." He then suggested that his "African brothers and sisters" should take another look and see the Peace Corps for what it really is. "What is it?" a voice from the audience asked, and killers to the

with the barest of pauses, Malcolm replied with a broad smile, "Exactly what

it

says: Peace

Corps

—get

a piece of

your country."

103

Jan Carew

This kind of swift, perfectly timed, and biting repartee struck a responsive chord in the audience.

It

was very much

in line

with the

and laughter and cheers interrupted Malcolm's speech for a moment. From this point onward, it was clear that Malcolm had won over most of the audience. Dermot and I stood at opposite ends of the stage. Malcolm's back was turned to us. He held himself erect and stood on one spot throughout his speech; occasionally we saw his face in profile with its changing expressions, from wide-mouthed laughter to an earnestness that was so intense he reminded me of a black leopard British debating tradition,

about to spring. His eyes, too, never faces before him.

He was one

gave his best to his

them

listeners,

into his confidence.

storyteller,

griefs of

and a

griot.

He

left

the audience, searching the

of those rare speakers

and through

He was

who

always

his discourse he

took

at different times a teacher, a

could use words to

distill

the collective

Black people and transform them into hard, crystalline

calls for action. His

was an eloquent

exercise in Aristotle's cathar-

and purging of the spirit as he shifted the collective mood deftly from the somber to the amused and from the indignant to the sad and the triumphant. When he talked about the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, two white, one Black there was a note of subdued anger in his voice, and his eyes glittered like diamonds. At sis

—

that

moment,

die for beliefs killers

it

—

me forcibly that he was willing to Patrice Lumumba, he would face his

once again struck

and

that, like

calmly, unflinchingly, and defy

"When

them with

his last breath.

they found the bodies," he declared, "they said that

was as if had gone insane while they were beating him to

every bone in the body of the Black one those brutes

was broken.

... It

death."

His bald, detailed account of the murder of three

workers and the bombing of a church that resulted four children brought tears to

some

civil rights

in the

death of

eyes while others flashed with

anger and shame. Then raising strong and elegant hands shields

on

either side of his face, he declared:

like

GHOSTS

104 It is

the African revolution that produced the Black

movement.

It is

the civil rights the

OUR BLOOD

IN

open ...

the Black

movement

a people

rights of dark-skinned

Muslim movement

Muslim

that pushed

that pushed the liberals out into

who

have no more concern for the

humanity than they do

for

any other

form of humanity.

wondered whether Malcolm had seen the tears and the anger in the eyes fixed on him white tears and Black tears, white anger and Black anger for transatlantic victims of racist violence. Threading its way through that brilliant speech was a pristine belief in the "African revolution." This was a declaration of faith by someone who would not live long enough to see the twists and turns that revolution would take or the brutal and savage lowintensity warfare unleashed against whole societies that were trying to free themselves from the imperialist yoke. Toward the end of his speech Malcolm the visionary moved away from parochial moorings into the open seas of world revolution. "The Black man in the Western Hemisphere," he declared, "and especially in the United States, is beginning to see where his problem is not one of civil rights, but it is rather one of human rights. Once this problem is brought onto the world stage, then we can join forces with brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and those people in Europe who would I

—

join us to see that our rights are guaranteed, because," he con-

cluded, and his voice

was charged with

"the oppressed masses of people

out for action against the

all

common

how

over the world

.

.

.

are crying

oppressor."

In that last part of his speech,

indication of

a passionate conviction,

Malcolm gave

the clearest

he had changed and, consequently,

how

his

worldview had changed. Talking about the new revolutionary role the "Black man in the Western Hemisphere" was being called on to play, he

was

in fact confessing that he'd

simplistic racial

nostrums of

his earlier

was also outlining the new direction American Unity would be taking. And

way from

the

Black Muslim period.

He

come

his

a long

Organization of Afro-

implicit in this declaration

Jan Carew

was

105

the combination of a Garveyite nationalism

Africanism of

Kwame Nkrumah, W.

E. B.

Du

and the PanGeorge Pad-

Bois,

L. R. James and others. He was, in short, affirming, before him, that when Africa is free and united, had done they

more, and C. as

then Black people everywhere will be treated with respect.

Malcolm was appealing

directly to the finest instincts of the

overwhelming majority of young people in the audience. He was calling on Black people everywhere to unite and stand shoulder to shoulder with Asians, Latin Americans, and "those people in

Europe, some of

whom

claim to

mean

do whatever

right, [to]

necessary to [ensure] that our rights are guaranteed us

sometime

in the

is

—not

long future, but almost immediately."

These bold statements indicated that he was

new political,

midst of

in the

and economic theories. The ones that had served him well when he was transforming formulating

Elijah

Muhammad's

social, religious,

obscure, millenarian

movement into

a nation-

wide one that was alarming the white power structure were no longer valid.

The theory

that Black people should

was

businesses in their neighborhoods

philosophy of Black nationalism.

It is,

could exist largely unto themselves.

when

and suggested that

system one could have capitalist

wish fulfillment than economic

fact.

the small

economic

of course, a perfectly valid

theory. But the theory caged itself in the ghettos in a capitalist

own

central to the

communes

that

It became more theology and Malcolm had pointed out that

the people of the inner cities could not have face-to-face

confrontations with absentee owners of businesses in their neigh-

when

borhoods, they would attack their property instead, that those folks were accused of rioting and "destroying their

neighborhoods,"

and

this

was

false, since the

itinerants in the inner cities

clothes

on

own

majority were tenants

who owned

little

besides the

their backs.

But those invisible agents of exploitation

—the absentee

—were actually piggybacking on the bigger

land-

capitalists

such as

the real estate conglomerates, the food industry, the banks,

and so

lords

on. These were the

most formidable predators in the capitalist was more absolute than

free-market forests, but their invisibility

GHOSTS

106

on

that of those riding

I\

01 R BLOOD

They were screened from

their backs.

the

gaze of have-nots in the ghetto by towering battlements of class, race, gender,

and an elaborate

state apparatus.

While he was abroad, Malcolm could exploitation

heads of

and not

state

and

just its strands in the ghettos.

his

He

saw

also

among

imperialism, colonialism, and

clearly that religion, be

Hindu, Buddhist, or any other, could be used

minds of

His meetings with

long conversations with them had helped him

to see the visceral connections racism.

whole network of

see the

awaken them

believers or to

power to make the world Malcolm occasionally

it

Christian,

to a consciousness of their

a better place for everyone. relieved the intensity with

which he ex-

pressed his ideas by a very telling and witty remark. After

Martin Luther King,

Jr.,

Muslim,

either to anesthetize the

damning

with faint praise, for example, he declared

way

that whites should be grateful for the

in

which

his nonviolent

preachings had been able to hold a restive Black population in check.

However, he cautioned, although there were those who wanted to believe differently,

King was

explosive situation. "That

is

in fact losing control of a potentially

why

"You want someone

you're in trouble," he said, smiling

come and tell you that your house is safe, while you're sitting on a powder keg." The laughter that greeted this statement was both friendly and broadly.

spontaneous.

I

to

kept thinking as

audience, "Here's

Malcolm

I

watched those eager faces

in the

giving the white imperialists and

and yet this predominantly white audience is simply lapping it up. Three months earlier, when Malcolm had taken part in the Oxford Union debate, the same thing had happened."

racists hell,

From my vantage sitting in the

was

point,

back row.

fast asleep.

I

I

could see a middle-age Black

He had

man

and the child some kind of could be sedated and would

a child in his arms,

said to myself, "I

informer because the sleeping child provide him with a perfect cover.

wonder

He

isn't

could have a recorder on his person or the

if

he's

taking notes, but he

child's.

The bloke might

even be some kind of assassin. Jesus Christ, Jan, don't be bloody paranoid!" every

I

kept looking at the man's brown and grizzled face

now and

then, but

it

told

me

nothing.

He was

listening

Jan Carew intently. its

When

sleep but the

The

107

others in the audience laughed, the child stirred in

man's face remained masklike and imperturbable.

laughter, though,

made Malcolm pause and wait

until

it

subsided before he continued.

At the end of the formal question period, Malcolm mingled with and answered questions, giving his full

the crowd, shook hands,

whom he spoke. Michael De had the man with the sleeping child. Freitas had vanished and so Dermot, with his eyes fixed on Malcolm as he conversed with this or that individual said, "If the brother had asked those white students to join him at the barricades, the majority of them attention to every individual to

would've done so."

"They'd have joined him immediately

after he'd

spoken,"

I

said,

"but after they had time to think things over, he'd be manning the barricades alone.

Still,

remember what he

one or two people

said,

and

it

in that

crowd

might change their

will

lives.

always

And

then,

perhaps, they'll change the lives of others."

On the way to his next appointment, the flu reasserted itself and Malcolm slumped down in the backseat of the car. "I was trying to detect who the British and American agents were in the crowd," I said, and he perked up. "Did you notice the man with the child in his arms?" "Yes, there

I

was

spotted him," a white

guy

sitting a

He follows me around "A secret agent who isn't

him.

I

asked.

Malcolm

said.

"He wasn't an

agent, but

few rows from the back. I recognized

everywhere."

Dermot commented. me," Malcolm said, straightening himso secret,"

"They try to intimidate and laughing. "He's pumping up the adrenaline for his next meeting," I told myself, looking at him in the rearview mirror. "Jesus Lord, the chap's amazing." Somehow, at that moment I remembered the simple inscription on Henri Christophe's tomb: "I WILL RISE AGAIN FROM MY ASHES." And I thought, "The only way they'll be able to prevent Malcolm from rising again from his ashes would be to let him live and discredit himself. If they kill him, he's sure to rise from his ashes again and again." self

7Si

M

SEVEN I

was

when

afraid of

I'm

life

and asked myself, what

will

it

be

like

grown up?

—Rigoberta Menchii /

have forgotten the

idle

words that people

said,

But treasure the day when iron doors swung wide

and

I

slipped into the heartland of my people.

—Juanita Bell

The biographers of Malcolm X—and their numbers are increasing every year

—have never portrayed

Louise Langdon Norton

was. She

is,

Little, as the

his

Grenadian mother,

remarkable

women

that she

instead, invariably depicted as a distraught, tragic

who after her husband's murder succumbed to madness and committed to a mental hospital. From then onward, she was disappears from the pages of history. When Louise Little is mentioned in the biographies of her figure

famous son, her life story is more notable for its omissions than for what is actually told about her. Alex Haley's portrayal in his Autobiography of Malcolm X is more sympathetic than all of the others. Nevertheless, even Haley leaves an erroneous impression of Louise. The persistently maligned "brainless" and "hot-blooded" 109

GHOSTS

110 female of color the

minds of

is

its

IN

one of those

01 R

BLOOD

sexist cliches that dies

victims. Rufina

University, once confessed that the

image of herself as a West Indian

hard even

Wynter, a professor first

in

at Stanford

time she saw a true literary

woman of mixed blood was when

she read Edgar Mittelholzer's novel

The

Life

and Death of Sylvia.

Before the rewarding discovery of the Sylvia in that sensitively

wrought and illuminating novel, she

had invariably seen women of color as unintelligent, oversexed, and exotic creatures breathlessly waiting to be used and rejected by white heroes. Literature, films, and television have provided us with an infinite number of distorted images of the fictitious and dehumanized mulatto female. This was part of a rationale used to justify slavery and its monstrous cruelties. Frederick Douglass, in his brilliant and moving autobiography, left us an unforgettable record of how mulattoes, both male and female, had to face a special brand of said, she

and exploitation in the American South. The offspring of white plantation owners and slave women, he said, were almost invariably treated more harshly than their unmixed malice, spite, hatred,

He himself, he attested, grew up knowing that his was the owner of the plantation on which he worked as a slave. The white wives of the planters, in particular, he said, vented a special kind of jealous wrath upon the mulatto offspring of their

African kin. father

husbands. Their husbands' eradicable resemblances

infidelities

on the

features,

stamped painful and

in-

mannerisms, and the very

aura of those mulatto slaves.

When

Fidel Castro declared at a rally in

we [Cubans] look

white,

we

are

all

Havana, "Even when

mulattoes," he was, for the

time, publicly acknowledging that there

first

were ghosts of dark

ancestors in the blood of millions in this hemisphere and that this was a legacy of slavery, exploitation, and the usurpation of Native American land. He was also affirming that we must make this a

source of strength, since these ghosts in our blood are there to

complex one color, and culture

remind us constantly that our liberation struggle in

which

historical conflicts of race, class, caste,

determine both

The notes

I

how we

see ourselves

is

a

and how others

had taken about Louise

Little

see us.

during

my

chance

111

Jan Carew

encounter with the Grenadian matriarch Tanta Bess and my conversations with Malcolm X in London would have continued to languish in

my files if I had not taken part in a television show on

the crisis of Black education in Washington, D.C., in 1990.

Paul Lee, a young, indefatigable, and able research scholar, saw the

TV show

Paul, as

I

in Detroit

was soon

and contacted me through the producer. is one of those rare self-educated

to discover,

individuals

whom

worldwide

role in the Black liberation struggle.

one occasionally runs into in Black communities. After dropping out of college, he devoted his life and personal resources to collecting invaluable material on Malcolm X and his I

was

a Visiting

Robinson Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and History at George Mason University when Paul phoned me. A few weeks

after

our conversation, he visited

me

in Fairfax, Vir-

and presented me with photocopied pictures of Malcolm X and me at the Commonwealth Institute reception in London. Shortly afterward, with the idea of writing a book on Malcolm X

ginia,

slowly crystallizing in

my mind, I was

Paul's guest in Detroit for a

few days. During that visit was amazed and profoundly impressed both by the content of the material he had amassed and by the way he had carefully arranged and meticulously classified the priceless I

documents. Seeing the array of research material trained librarian, archivist, or research scholar

in his study, a

would have been

envious.

Through Wilfred,

I

Paul,

I

met Wilfred

Little,

learned afterward, not only

Malcolm's

eldest brother.

was one of

Paul's mentors,

he was also the mentor to several generations of Black youth in Detroit.

He was

powerfully

in his early seventies

heraldic figure in still

Moorish Spain. His manner of

in

1990,

tall,

sitting perfectly

when he spoke stood out in stark Malcolm I remembered; Malcolm could

with his large hands in repose

contrast to the restless

never

sit

still

for long,

sponded and moved voice. Wilfred

my

when I met him

with the large head and bold features of a

built,

was

and

his eloquent

in perfect

also

much

hands constantly

harmony with

re-

the cadences of his

darker than Malcolm. "I took after

father," he told me. "I have

his color

and

his physique.

He was

GHOSTS

112 the strongest

man I

OIR BLOOD

I\

ever knew, though, and even in

my prime I was

never as strong as he was."

My first serious conversations with Wilfred guest in his house in 1991.

me

he visited

in

They continued

Bloomington,

Illinois.

began when

was

I

a

when

later in the year

Before launching into

reminiscenses about his mother, Wilfred said, "We're living in a illusions. When I talk to people, I tell them that all the warn them, 'Hey, look, this is a world of illusions, it's a great, big phony world! What you think you see is not really what you see.' They teach a lot of idealism to students in the best schools,

world of time.

I

when they get out into the real world, they find that it's a whole different way that things are run out there, that there's a whole lot but

of lying, deceiving, cheating, and murder out there.

knew

it,

and Malcolm knew

my

it.

But I'm proud of

my

My

mother family, and

way made us grow up with a self-identity and with pride in what we were. Malcolm continued the work that my father and mother started. He took their Marcus proud that

parents in their modest

Garvey philosophy a step further." In his quiet avuncular fashion, Wilfred different story of his mother's

phers of

Malcolm

X

had so

far

life

began

telling

an entirely

from the one that the biogra-

penned. "The story of her

an epic one," he declared proudly. "The epic began

in

continued in Canada, and ended here in the States. In countries there are parts of her

life

tall,

and she carried

Grenada, three

all

five feet eight

herself well. Because she always held

herself erect, she looked taller, but beside

was

was

waiting to be resurrected.

"She was a small-boned and slender woman, inches

life

my

six-foot-four father

and had a full head of hair. Her feet, though, were narrow, and she had a time finding shoes. Yes, she carried herself well, and the springs didn't go out of her legs until she was past eighty and talking about feet, I remember Malcolm's feet and the way he used to walk. With his she looked short. She

also fair-skinned

—

tall self,

special

he had what

way

I

called a tiger-boy walk.

of walking.

Malcolm. But

You

my mother

could

tell

from

He sure had his own

a distance that

it

was

didn't simply disappear into a world of

113

Jan Carew

madness

after

my father's death, so let me try and fill in some of the

missing pieces for you.

"When my father died on September 28, an unfinished house.

My father was

1931,

we were

living in

a master builder, he could

do

—the foundation work, the plumbing, the roofing, the the finishing touches to a house so plastering — and he could put everything

all

that

looked

it

real nice.

He

literally built

our

home with

his

own

two hands. He had to build it one section at a time. Because of his Garveyite beliefs, nobody would give him a regular job. The whites said that he was uppity, and there were a lot of frightened Negroes who grumbled that he and my mother were rocking the boat. But he was a resourceful man and she was a resourceful woman. He'd leave home early and walk the roads, going from farm to farm and and he offering to do whatever repairs the farm buildings needed could point out to the farmers where repairs were needed, so those white farmers would allow him to do that kind of odd-job work for them. He was good at it, and they had a respect for his skill as a

—

worker.

"But

own

let

me back up

a

bit.

We plowed and planted crops on our

land and raised most of our

my

own

home and show us

food, so before he

left

would take us outside weeds up from between the rows. So before he went on his rounds, each one of us had a job to do, and my mother would see to it that we did it before he came back home in the evening. And if they both had to go out, the oldest child that's me would be in charge. Malcolm was always the most rebellious of us. As he got older and became more independent, he'd find some excuse to go back to the house for something, and we wouldn't see him again. He'd go and get with his friends in in the

mornings,

what he wanted us

—

the city.

father

to do, like getting the

—

When my

father returned

home

in the evening,

on the season, he'd plow and plant and weed and

make the strongest men

depending

harvest. Then, bit

was one of I ever knew. My mother, too, worked all day and well into the night; she made dresses and crocheted gloves for mostly white women. If my father had continued to live, no telling by

bit,

he'd

additions to the house. Physically, he

GHOSTS

IN 01

R BLOOD

what we would have turned out to be, because we were a very tight family. We worked together, and our parents always had us working toward some useful goal. "But my father's death had a devastating effect on our tight family unit. We were living in Lansing at the time, and I'll always remember the night he was almost cut in half on the streetcar line. He had come home after a long day's work and was just about to settle down for the night when he announced that he was going back into town to get something he had forgottten. 'Don't go, Earlie,' my mother pleaded with him, 'I have a strange feeling that something bad could happen to you out there tonight.' She had a way of foretelling events, and I don't remember her ever being wrong. But my father had made up his mind. He put on his jacket and left saying that he'd be back soon. She ran after him, calling out, 'Don't go, Earlie! Come back, Earlie!' I can't remember ever seeing her like that before. Anyway, I stayed with her as usual while she did her chores, and a couple of hours later we heard a noise as if someone opened the front door, entered, and walked upstairs. 'Did you hear your father come in and go upstairs?' my mother asked. 'Yes, I heard as if someone come in,' I said, but when she went upstairs and checked, he wasn't there. It wasn't too long after that that a state trooper came to the door and told my mother that she should come to the hospital right away because my father had been seriously injured in an accident. "So, all of a sudden, my mother was on her own with all those children and no help from anywhere. Other Black people who lived in the city looked upon us as being odd because we were always going against the stream and our parents were always challenging things that they didn't think were right. My father was always out there trying to encourage our people to get together and do something to improve their lives, but they felt that he and my mother were rocking the boat and that she, in particular, didn't think the a

way

they did. She didn't like the idea of charity, but

sudden she had no husband, and there was no way with

children but to accept charity.

insurance

company was

The house was

saying that

my

all

all

of

those

unfinished, the

father's death

was

a

Jan Carew

115

and the ones who controlled the welfare system were giving her a hard time, putting undue pressures on her. They wanted her to sell the house, but she refused. A few of my mother's suicide,

West Indian

friends did try to help out, but the

odds against her

were increasing. She was a very good seamstress. She made our clothes, and then,

like

I

said before, she

sewed

all

of

for mostly white

customers. There were very few Black ones.

remember that when we lived in Milwaukee, we had a little store and a storefront, with an apartment next door. She used the store to sell her merchandise. Back in those days, the boys wore a jacket and knickers to match, and the girls wore dresses with bloomers that came below the dresses. She was brave, and she was a fighter. She worked harder at her dressmaking after she was widowed. Young as I was then, I could see that she was tired and trying to take on too much. I went to school in the daytime and worked in a general store in the evening to make extra money and help pay the bills and things, and my mother would say, 'I don't know what I would do if it wasn't for Wilfred. He doesn't act like a child anymore. He just takes on responsibility like a man.' "But what happened was this: there was a phony probate judge who was more or less in charge, and he put a lot of pressure on my mother. He wanted to buy the property and leaned on her to sell. He'd tell her that she couldn't stay on welfare and own that property, which was untrue. He arranged it so that her monthly check as a widow would come through him, and every time she went to collect it he would put more pressure on her to sell the property. When she realized what he was doing, she started sending me to collect the check. But this judge's secretary, and I can't remember his name or hers, would keep telling me that he wasn't in. So my mother sent me back and said, 'When she tells you he isn't in, just say that I told you to wait.' So I went back and waited and other people kept going into his office, so after a while he came out and handed me the check. Now, he and other officials began increasing the pressure on her and saying that she needed to go into an institution. I took her to a psychiatrist myself. He was white, and I can't remember his name either. I asked him to "I

GHOSTS

116

I\

01 R

BLOOD

examine my mother and tell me what was going on. He made an appointment to see her on a Saturday, and I took her to him, and he

some time with needs proper rest and spent

her,

and the next day he came and

nutrition.

If

there's

said, 'She

someone who could take

over her responsibilities for a while so that she could get the proper nutrition little

and not be responsible

for anyone, she'd be all right in a

while.' But there wasn't anyone."

Perhaps because, even now,

mother's

telling the story of his

journey in and out of a psychological Gethsemane painful, Wilfred left out details about the

is

still

too

symptoms of her immi-

nent nervous breakdown, which he certainly must have witnessed.

Why

else

would he have accompanied her

mother's inexplicable withdrawal into a fantasies

and dreams and the changes

to a psychiatrist? His safe, private

in her

world of

behavior must have

bewildered and traumatized not only Wilfred, but also Malcolm

and the other

The anguish this engendered would their young minds when their mother

Little siblings.

have been exacerbated

in

was summarily committed

to a mental hospital, while they

were

consigned to different foster homes. After surviving twenty-five years of forced confinement, Louise

was rescued by Wilfred, Malcolm, and other family members. She went to live with her daughter Yvonne in a small country town named Woodland in upper Michigan. She died there in 1991 at age ninety-one. "So she survived Malcolm by twenty-six years, and Little

during that period she enjoyed a normal and peaceful existence, but

nobody seems

to take that into account

when writing about her

Wilfred explained. In 1993, after visiting Grenada for the

first

life,"

time,

he said, "Perhaps someday her remains can finally be laid to rest at

La Digue, where she was born and where she grew up."

As

my

conversations with Wilfred continued, images of Louise

Little as a

tragic, victimized

female faded and bold

new ones

portrayed her as a complex, heroic, strong-willed, and intelligent

Grenadian

woman who,

despite

all

of the tragedies that had

befallen her, played a vital role in shaping the character of her

"During the years between childhood and early youth," Wilfred said, "my mother and father, who were both staunch

children.

Jan Carew Garveyites,

handed to

all

of their children a sense of racial pride.

She had a better formal education than

had

117

a respect for learning. She told

my father did, but they both me that she'd attended an

Anglican school in Grenada and that the teachers believed that sparing the rod spoiled the child. So she passed on to us

some of the

from her own upbringing, just like my father did from his. They had to teach us how to survive in a hostile white world, and now I can understand why they had to be strict. But in addition strictness

to drilling her in the three R's as

if

her

life

depended on

it,

my

mother's Grenadian teachers taught her to recite poetry and helped her develop a love for words.

My

mother constantly dinned into

our heads that a good education offered the best chance for us to

make something worthwhile Wilfred could thought,

sit

as

still

"He never gestures with

How different the two are! you can

of our lives."

see

dedicated,

how

all his life

American shaman, and I hands they way Malcolm did.

as a Native

Even

his

after a short time in his presence,

he has had to be cautious, disciplined,

and absolutely responsible." He reminded me of a wise who always tests bridges before crossing them. There

old elephant

was sit

when he continued: we came home from school, my mother would

a chuckle in his voice

"Every day when us

down and have

us read aloud passages from Marryshow's

paper The West Indian. Marryshow was her countryman and

somebody she boasted about all the time. He and Garvey were her two idols. Marryshow, a Black Grenadian, could write the English language with more polish and, at the same time, tell you more about the world situation than

all

those white reporters writing in

Anyway, when we were doing our was always a dictionary on the table, and when we mispronounced a word my mother made us look it up and learn both to spell and to pronounce it correctly. By reading that Marryshow paper day after day, we developed reading and writing skills superior to those of our white classmates. By reading

the Detroit papers put together.

homework,

there

Garvey's paper and Marryshow's paper, international affairs their

own

we

got an education in

and learned what Black people were doing

betterment

all

over the world."

for

GHOSTS

118

IN

01 R

BLOOD

Wilfred then mentioned quite casually that Garvey had visited their

home on

several occasions

that one of the aides

and that

his

mother had told him

who accompanied him was

a cousin of hers.

remember this aide of Garvey's accompanying him wherever he went, and I'm sure, from the way he looked, that he must have had some East Indian blood in him," Wilfred said. "But I can never forget that when Marcus Garvey was on the run from the FBI, my mother hid him in our house and wrote letters and dispatches for him. She was an educated woman who could write clearly and well; and several times, she received letters from the leaders of the movement thanking her for the work she had done and praising "I

her for her devotion to the cause."

Wilfred recalled that regardless of his

how

onerous and demanding

mother's daily chores were, and they were indeed daunting, she

always found time to supervise their homework. After her husband

was murdered by stricter

"As

the Klan, however, for a while she

than ever. a

widow with

eight

mouths

to feed

became

— " Wilfred began, and

then, without finishing the sentence, he declared, "Keeping the

was always uppermost in her mind. As things got became an obsession." Once again, he did not continue, but I had heard enough. The picture he had drawn of his mother had already brought her to life for me. The burst of strictness was part of

family together

worse,

this

a desperate bid to teach last-minute lessons in survival to her children

before a concatenation of pressures overwhelmed her.

Wilfred then emphasized a point that the biographers of Mal-

colm have ignored: "Although the family was broken up, my mother's early teachings stayed with us. I always remember that she didn't like to live in the

city,

and

my

father didn't like

it

either.

Whenever we lived in a big city, was out, my father would always take us to the country. We would stay on farms with friends, sometimes spending a month or so there. They wanted us to be exposed to country life and to get to know about nature. My mother liked to take us out into the woods and show us different herbs and tell us what they could cure she'd teach us things about nature that we would never learn about during the summer, once school

Jan Carew in the city. I

lived in.

119

me have a better understanding of the world Another thing when we were living in Wisconsin, she This helped

was always

—

a

welcome guest on

a nearby Indian reservation.

Indians treated her like one of their own, and she'd

and

join

them

in singing their chants.

know

I

was

sit

The

with them

that she spent time

just

connecting her to an

became increasingly

clear that the story of

with the Caribs in Grenada, so

this

experience from her past."

As

I

his

mother's

spoke to Wilfred, life

in

it

Grenada, despite

all

of

its

intriguing omissions,

had, with advancing years, loomed larger and larger nation. This

was only

in his imagi-

natural, since, as the eldest in the family, he

had been her principal confidant after her husband's death. After his visit to Grenada in 1993, Wilfred confessed that the journey to his mother's homeland had been one of the most important and rewarding in his life. That visit, he said, helped him to gather fragments from stories of her early life that she had told him over the years and to piece them together as he had never been able to do before. One of the highlights of his visit was when his Grenadian hosts took him to the spot on which his great-grandmother's house had once stood. All traces of what had once been the family home for three generations, however, were erased by time, neglect, hurri-

and successive growth of

and yet it was in that vanished house that his mother was born and it was there that she had grown up. Apart from stating the bald facts about that canes,

historic visit, Wilfred told

me

tropical vegetation,

nothing about

looking at that vacant, overgrown plot of land.

however, he confessed that he would

like to

how

he

felt

while

A few months later, have

his mother's

ashes returned to Grenada and buried on that spot, so that

although the house was no longer there, the

where she had would be kept

memory

of this place

and played and dreamed her first dreams alive. For Malcolm, her world-renowned fourth son, was the inheritor of those dreams, and he had immortalized them with his enchanted tongue and his legendary courage. Making that spot a hallowed one would also complete the transatlantic lived

GHOSTS

120

IN

01 R

BLOOD

of which Malcolm, his redoubtable father, and his mother had taken part in an epic struggle for human rights

ellipsis inside

fearless

and human

When

dignity.

he returned from Grenada, Wilfred commented with a

chuckle that although he already

knew

that

Malcolm was

greatly

this admiration nevertheless had become more conscious of the negative side of the adulation that his famous brother enjoyed at home and abroad, since there seemed to be more and more detractors and

admired abroad, the extent of astonished him.

He had

also

idolators alike, claiming that they friends supposedly privy to the family.

With

a slow smile

and

were blood

relatives or friends of

most intimate a deprecating

secrets of the Little

wave of

the hand,

"From time to time, folk in Lansing will call and tell me some kind of critter is running around town asking a lot of questions about our family. I remember that a few years ago, there was one, in particular, who they said was writing a book, and all he wanted to hear was something derogatory. If they told him something good, he didn't want to hear it. Well, when you omit our good deeds and brave deeds and positive achievements, we become accustomed to seeing ourselves as being powerless and without any real human identity, so if by running down someone like Malcolm, some little person can strut and shine for a moment, there's always room for him or her to jump at the chance to do this, and this applies Wilfred said, that

to folks in

Grenada

An American

just like

it

does to folks here."

X who

was obviously unaware of the complexity of social customs in West Indian society, wrote somewhat prissily that Louise's mother had had three children out of wedlock. The implication was that this showed a terrible flaw in her character. Although Louise was biographer of Malcolm

definitely not the child of

common-law

parents,

it

should have

been pointed out that the term "out of wedlock" is largely meaningless unless one is talking about the elites or the "respectable" lower middle class in West Indian society. The majority of West Indians do not regard "illegitimacy" as something to be excoriated. The fact is that a significant percentage of West Indian children born "out of wedlock" are the offspring of parents living

Jan Caren in stable

common-law

21

family units. Governments in the English-

speaking Caribbean, therefore, have been forced to change the

laws of inheritance to deal more

of couples living in

Grenadian parlance,

common-law unions

not churched." Since Catholicism

and the must be

and compassionately with

fairly

this all-pervasive reality. In local

priests declare that all

is

the

is

said

that "they're married but

main

religion of the island

unions between

by marriage, Grenadians

sanctified

it

men and women compromise some time in the

strike a

with the Almighty by constantly affirming that

at

distant future they "intend" to have their marriage "churched."

common-law

working-class Grenadian will describe his or her partner as

"my

A

intended."

Louise Langdon's white father, however, in his blatant exploitation of her Creole mother, droit de seigneur

—the

was merely

exercising his semifeudal

right of the Bushas, the Buckras, the scions

of the planter class to use

women

for their carnal satisfaction

and

then to discard them. In Louise's time, too, the Bushas in Grenada

were not only white, they also had brown or black imitators.

Where

the darker-skinned Bushas were concerned, their status as

professionals, high-ranking civil servants, landowners, or busi-

nessmen could "whiten" them. Because emigration from Grenada had been a necessity in the past and remains so to this day, both close and distant relatives in Louise's extended family are

The

stories of her

now scattered across three continents.

growing up

in rural

Grenada

are, therefore,

fragmented and dispersed across the Caribbean and America, Great Britain, Canada, and the United

in

Latin

States. All of those

who knew her as a child growing up in La Digue, however, are now dead, and

memory

plays strange tricks

when

it is

generation to the next. But the oral tradition

filtered is

still

Grenada, and a fortunate but purely accidental meeting with a venerable matriarch confirmed

this.

from one alive in

in Bacolet

She had introduced

but everyone calls

am Mistress Bessie Roumain from La Digue, me Tanta Bess, and that's what you can call me,

young man."

the

herself

by saying, "I

It is

custom

introduce themselves, they

tell

Grenada that when people you their name and the place where in rural

GHOSTS

122

I\

01 R

BLOOD

they were born, because their umbilical cord particular village, hamlet, or town, bonding

spot on earth for

"La Digue?

is

buried in that

them there

to a sacred

life.

Isn't that

where Malcolm X's mother grew up?"

I

asked.

"That's where Louise Langdon was born," she confirmed.

I

already knew that she and Louise had grown up together. Someone had told me so, and that was why I had asked a friend to take me to her house in the hills. Once I had befriended her and allayed her suspicions, she began to talk to me freely about Louise and her

must confess, though, that talking to a number of other folk, I often recalled Oscar Wilde's quip about the Irish, and I couldn't help concluding with the same perceptive cynicism of that Irish wit that Grenadians too are a very honest people: they never speak well of one another. In 1979, when I lived in Grenada, there were still older folk who could talk about Louise and her Langdon, Orgias, Norton, and other relatives as if she had only left the island recently. At that time, however, Louise had already migrated, first to Canada and family.

I

then to the United States, over half a century ago. But in the oral tradition, time

is

compressed so that past happenings, embroidered

with gossip, imaginative speculation, and a sprinkling of truths,

can be highlighted and dramatized. Tanta Bess told her sense of conviction and an unusual that

left

memory

in a

with a

for significant details

no doubt about the authenticity of her

always sat

tales

recollections. She

room dappled with sunlight and past back to life more vividly than

rocking chair in a

shadows, and she brought the

photograph albums, notes, and

diaries could

have done for me. As

would occasionally run into the Whenever I looked away from Tanta Bess's lined, nutmeg-brown face, her white hair, and shrewd, glittering eyes, my eyes lighted on the mango and cherry trees in her front yard. Every now and then, when her voice trailed off into a hoarse whisper, I leaned forward to hear what she was she spoke, a great-grandchild

room and shoo an

saying,

and

I

errant chicken away.

sound of one of the plump, blood-red to the ground or the muted conversation of birds

also heard the

cherries falling

Jan Carew

123

echoing inside the room. Because of the

me

at first,

tions she

I

had grown accustomed

in chronological order,

moment. So her answers

our

first

which she spoke to

to

my

eccentric patterns of thought.

meeting

why

I

was

silent

but according to her

mind, not

own

in

rumina-

to past events flashing across her

particular

her

way

could not help concluding that in her

mood

Although

I'd

explained at

interested in the story of Louise

Langdon's childhood and youth

me and placing a bowl "Why you so interested in

in

Grenada, for a week or

so, after

greeting

of fruit in front of me, she

ask,

Louise Langdon?"

that village folk literally find

the

web

it

at a

questions conformed to

would

And knowing

impossible to detach someone from

of an extended family, I'd repeat respectfully:

"She had a famous son, and a son or daughter without

first

how

know the truth about who their mother was,

can you

finding out

and who her family and her husband's family were?" After my third visit, her suspicions were finally allayed, and, rocking gently back and forth, she smiled and said, "I'm glad you come to keep an old lady company. Everybody busy these days, running around like chickens without a head. They never have time to listen." After a pause, she continued, "Yes, Louise

was my

Granny Langdon, her grandmother, that is, used to tell everybody who had ears to hear that she warned Louise's mother to stay away from Norton, that hit-and-run white man who was sweet-talking her, but the young, own-way woman had hard ears, and she didn't listen. That good-for-nothing Norton man was a big shot on the island, and his eye used to catch fire for colored women. So he well scattered his seed all over the place and leave friend.

befuddled

women

may

to live with the fruits of his misdeeds. Louise's

was so bent on having her own Granny Langdon's warnings. The good Lord blessed and cursed the women in that Langdon family with good looks and minds of their own. But one thing I can say mother,

way

her soul rest in peace,

that she turned deaf ears to

about them, they didn't have a snobbish bone although Louise's mother was a brown

in their bodies,

woman like me.

Because of

the white man's blood in her veins, Louise looked like a

Mung,

they didn't ever

make

Mung-

believe, in fact or fancy, that they

GHOSTS

124

IN

(MR BLOOD

were something that they were not. Like

my

family, they weren't

poor, but they weren't rich either. They were comfortable, though,

and didn't have to scratch and scrounge for a living. If Louise wanted to play white, she had the color and hair to do it, but, even if it wasn't in her nature to do stupidness like that and to tell you the God's truth, it wasn't that grandmother of hers wouldda put a stop to that kind of behavior from the start. It still have plenty foolishness in this place. Take the matter of hair. Stupid people will say that there is good hair and bad hair, but what I say is this: there's obedient hair and unruly hair. Hair that can give a comb a hard time is obedient hair, the strongest wind can't blow it all over the place, water can't paste it to your skull and block your vision with it, and no matter how hard you shake your head, it will stay in

—

—

place

—

"What was

"How

Louise's mother like?" I asked, interrupting her. you mean? What she looked like or what she was as

a

woman?" "Both."

was too young to remember, but my mother told me that she was a good looker, with color and good hair. Musta had some coolie blood in her, or Carib in addition to the tar brush, she said, though she wasn't sure exactly which one. Mother and daughter, though, were cut from the same cloth of waywardness. But Granny Gertrude Langdon brought Louise up with a strict hand. Now that was a woman with a wise head on her "She died when

I

shoulders!"

"Who?"

I

asked, because as the words flowed from her

seemed to assume that of the people about

I

was

whom

she

lips

already intimately acquainted with

she

all

was speaking.

"Grandmother Langdon, of course," she chided me and continued without a pause. "She was always warning Louise: 'Don't grow up to be like your mother, girl, she was too trusting and sweet-talking this:

men advantaged

her!'

Another thing

I

remember

is

she always used to refer to Louise's father as 'that hit-and-run

sailor

man' although Norton had

down

as a planter."

left

the sea years ago and settled

Jan Carew

125

"Didn't the two of you go to the same school?"

an old

man from La Digue had

"The same

school, yes,

told

and we

me

I

asked, because

so.

sat side

by side on the same

bench. Every day Louise turned up with her school uniform starched and

stiff

as

buckram, and clean, but by afternoon she'd be

home with her clothes all rumpled up. She could run deer we used to play rounders and hopscotch and climb up a mahogany tree in the school yard. You know how many times that girl get me in trouble? More times than I can count. We used to going

speed, and

take a shortcut home, pelt the cows, tease the ram-goats, chase the

fowls

wild, tomboy behavior, but —we got plenty — beatings for that

that didn't stop us

"Was

she bright?"

"Bright? She

was

brighter than

all

of us, but she didn't settle

down to studying until her grandmother started watching her like a hawk and paying Teacher Ansel to give her private lessons after school. Teacher Ansel I

— never could "

was from Dominica, and he was part Carib.

Her voice

trailed off, but

I

encouraged her to

continue, saying, "So she did better at school after this teacher

began giving her private lessons? Her grandmother must've been fairly well off then, to afford

way while

she

those lessons? Did Norton help in any

was growing up?"

She replied impatiently, "I told you already that Granny Langdon wasn't rich and that she wasn't poor either. And as for that Norton man, this island too small for Louise not to have met him face to face. Granny Langdon was proud, and she owned land; besides, she had relatives in Canada who sent her money." After an uncomfortable pause, she closed her eyes and reflected aloud, "On the way home, me and Louise used to sing out the poetry we learnt by heart from the Royal Reader." "Do you remember the poems?" I asked. Tanta Bess opened her eyes wide. "Of course I remember them!" was her indignant rejoinder, and without further ado she recited excerpts from different poems; "The cottage was a thatched one, the outside old and mean, yet everything within that cot was wondrous, neat and clean The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had

—

GHOSTS

126

—Oh, Mary go and

IN

OUR BLOOD

home, and call the cattle home across the sands of Dee There were maidens in Scotland more lovely by far who would gladly have wed the young Lochinfled

var.

.

.

call the cattle

—

."

The Royal Reader was a standard text in schools all over the British Empire. It had been replaced by more modern and relevant texts decades ago, but the old woman still remembered those disparate lines from poems that she and Louise had to learn by heart in elementary school.

"So you both liked to read and to recite poems?" "With the kind of teachers we had, we didn't have any

choice.

It

was wild cane on your back like fire if you didn't know those poems by heart! But Louise was also a champion for making up stories. The story of hers that I will always remember is this one: She would make up a tale 'bout how her real father was a prince who sailed the seas and how wicked strangers captured him, but someday he was going to escape and come back to Grenada to claim her as his daughter. I had a father when I was growing up, but she didn't, so she was creating a make-believe one to replace that good-for-nothing Norton man. Because the children at school would tease her by asking 'Who is your father, Louise?' But the ones who asked her that had to look out, because that girl had a temper, and when that temper rise up in her, she wasn't afraid of God or man." She switched from this topic to an even more melancholy one, without a pause, "When Grandmother Gertrude went to meet her Maker, Louise lived for a while with an aunt who wasn't anywhere as good to her that old lady was, but we were still best friends, and I went to visit her often. She was living near a

was

group of Caribs, and

this

I

remember, Teacher Ansel

related to them."

"Who,

the Caribs?"

"Yes."

"What happened to Ansel?" "He became a soldier-boy .

and went to

never came back, and life

short."

Turks

fight the I

don't

.

in

.

joined the

West Indian Regiment

some Jesus Christ

know

if

he lived or

if

Bible land.

that

war cut

He his

Jan Carew

127

"Sounds as if Ansel was a sweet-boy," I said, pulling her leg, and she smiled and confessed, "He was a douglab [a mix of African and Louise Amerindian] big and strapping and handsome always said that if she was a man she'd have joined up too, just to get away from the small-minded Grenadian people." .

I

.

changed the

Louise's

name

.

.

Tanta Bess was using

subject, convinced that

to express her

own

ire

.

.

with small-minded Grenadi-

ans.

"Tell

me

something? Did Louise's mother die giving birth to

her?"

"No, she went to meet her Maker a little time afterwards. But my mother told me that when the poor woman was heavy with child, she used go by the seaside all by herself, and sometimes she would get really vexed and curse Norton out loud so that the wind could carry her words to him. My mother said that there was fire inside her even though sickness was wracking her young body. Granny Gertrude used to say that her daughter fought

Trojan to stay

like a

alive for the sake of her one-child, but she lost the fight."

"So Louise didn't have any brothers or

sisters?"

"She had cousins and half-brothers and

half-sisters,

Norton's wild ways. But as for brothers and

had none." "Do you remember when she "Yes. The war was still on."

left

sisters

because of

of her own, she

Grenada?"

"You mean World War I?" "Yes, that one. German submarines were sinking ships

like peas.

But her uncle Langdon sent for her, and she was glad to leave the

who wasn't as nice to her as Granny me a few times."

aunt to

Gertrude was. She wrote

"Did you keep the letters?" "Don't you know that it's bad luck to keep

"Why?" dismissive

I

asked, but she brushed

wave

letter said that

of the

when

hand and

my

said, "I

letters?"

question aside with a

remember how

the

first

she boarded the ship, they wanted to put her

with the white people, but she told them that she was a Creole and that she preferred to travel with

home

folks

who

she could chat

GHOSTS

128

I\ 01

R BLOOD

how

with and be at her ease. Then she wrote

had

lifeboat drills,

and

all

the

way

up, they

was hard for her to fall was drowning and remember that part of her letter,

after those drills

it

asleep because she'd get nightmares that she that the ship

because eyes

I

was her

read

on Louise

Yankeeman

—

it

coffin.

I still

over and over again before

after she left for

a black

one

Canada.

I

I

burn

it.

I

never set

heard that she married a

— but she never came home again."

had noticed that when Tanta Bess spoke about her school days, come alive and shed years as she spoke, so I said, "Tell me more about the school you and Louise attended." She smiled and I

she'd

launched into recollections of those salad days immediately.

"Our

school was next door to the Anglican church.

sixth standard, the classes

people in La Digue treated him

by heart

He was

—

like

schoolmaster

like the

"Which one was that?"

first

to

were separated by rows of benches. The

schoolmaster always walked around with a wild cane

though.

From

I

if

in

hand. The

God Almighty, poem we had to learn

he was

in the

asked, but instead of replying directly,

she recited:

And still they gazed and

still

the

wonder grew

that one small

head

could carry

he

all

knew

Then she continued: "We

.

.

.

feared that schoolmaster like

man

how

mind where he slashed you with that wild cane. It used to leave more marks on Louise's fair skin than on my brown one, but she was brave like a Carib and would bite her lip till she could taste blood rather than cry. Two things I will remember 'bout Louise for as long as I have

chicken 'fraid of chicken hawk. That

breath in mi'body.

One

is

when

didn't

her grandmother passed away, and

was the dead body, and it

she had to go and help to bathe and dress the body. That first

time she had to see the dead and touch a

upset her a cold,

lot.

She said that her grandmother looked so small and

and she couldn't stop talking about

it.

She said that

it

wasn't

Jan Carew that

it

made

her afraid of the dead,

it

129

just

made death too

and ordinary." "What's the other thing you remember?"

I

familiar

asked.

"An old Carib woman told her that she was going to have to face five

sorrows

—the ing — that five

and that she'd already faced two of the of her mother and Grandmother Gertrude's pass-

in her

loss left

life,

three others."

"That old Carib

woman

seems to have missed a few. There was

her husband's murder, the breakup of her family, the authorities

having her committed to a mental hospital, and her son's assassination." There

was

asked sharply,

"Whether happen,"

I

it

a touch of irony in

"You

my voice as I said this, and she

don't believe in these things, do you?"

was prophecy or coincidence,

parried defensively. She shook her head sadly and

looked toward heaven, as though making a

Almighty to have mercy on

"What

the tragedies did

me

for

my

silent plea to the

irreverence.

do you remember?" I asked. She smiled, raised her clasped her hands to her chin, and said, "We used to sneak out at night and try and see the Ligaroo moving like a ball of fire the devil pelted across the swamps and cow pastures." "Did you ever see the Ligaroo?" I asked, trying to pull her leg, because this legendary African and Amerindian spirit of fire was an else

important

demon

figure in Grenadian folklore. do you think I'd be here to tell the tale?" "It's a pity you didn't keep those letters from Louise. They would be very valuable now." She shrugged. "I told you what Louise had written in her first letter to me. What more do you want?" she asked peevishly and continued, "She said that over there, she had to make a choice "If

I

did,

between being Black or white." "Yes, up there, you have to choose."

"That Yankeeland too complicated for my old brain to underit. That's why I never wanted to live anywhere else but right

stand

here."

"Do you know

that

when Louise went

to

Montreal to stay with

her uncle Edgerton Langdon, she became a Garveyite?"

GHOSTS

30

I\

01 R

BLOOD

"Well, white as she was, you would've expected her to turn her

back on Black people. But not the Louise too

saw

much gumption and left

here,

and

that's

the day she goes to meet her

My

knew. No,

Grenadian Creole woman. That's

herself as a

when he

I

father, Charles

sir.

She had

pride. Fair-skinned as she was, she always

who

who, I'm sure, she'd remain Maker."

Alan Carew, and

she

right

was

up to

his fair-skinned sister (they

were children by the same parents) had traveled to Montreal 1917, the same year in which Louise Langdon had done I

was

in

my

early teens,

remember him

I

once they were on board the ship, for whites only, while he

steerage.

My

had

telling

my aunt was

me

so.

in

When

jokingly that

assigned to a cabin

to be content with one close to the

aunt objected to being separated from her brother,

and she was relegated to a "for natives of color only" section. Louise boarded that ship for Canada, she too was called

When

upon, for the

first

time in her

colored, and she also

made

life,

to choose

between being white or

the choice unhesitatingly. Both

my aunt

and Louise had been brought up in similar rural, middle-class, colonial settings where they were thoroughly Creolized. They had

made

this choice

caste,

and

even though the

infinite

status in their village societies

complications.

gradations of class, color,

were

full

of subtleties and

My aunt, who lived to ninety-eight, was never fully

North American society and its culture of racial discrimination, and after working as a nurse for forty-five years she returned to Barbados to live out the final decades of her life. Louise, however, was integrated into American society through her uncle, her husband, her children, and her commitment to the integrated into the

struggle for Black liberation. It

was during

father

the turbulent aftermath of

mentioned

in a letter to his sister that

World War

I

that

my

Garvey's philosophy of

Black pride, African liberation, and the return of the sons and

daughters of the African diaspora to their ancestral motherland

began to create seismic rumblings throughout the Black world, The tremors of that Garveyite movement and

its

aftershocks affected

Jan Carew

131

Black people not only in Canada and the United States but also in

and South America, Africa, and Europe. Louise first heard of Marcus Garvey from her Uncle Edgerton Langdon. In 1916, a year before she immigrated to Montreal, he

the Caribbean, Central

had traveled to

New York to visit friends in Harlem, and they had

taken him to a meeting in

Mark's Hall to hear Garvey speak.

St.

That meeting had marked a turning point

and he began

in his life,

to spread the Garveyite message soon after his return to Montreal. It

won

nity.

from members of the Black commu-

a sympathetic response

That message has reverberated for three-quarters of a century,

for today there

is

still

a functioning chapter of Garvey's United

Negro Improvement Association Little,

Montreal. Louise Langdon

her uncle Edgerton Langdon, her husband Earl Little, as

Garveyite devotees and

which

in

all

new

the succeeding Black

on Canada and

converts, laid the foundation

Power movements

in

the United States were built.

Louise met Earl

one knows

how

Little at a

Garvey conference

in

Montreal.

No

long their courtship lasted. However, they were

married in Montreal on

May

10, 1919,

two years

after

Louise

arrived in Canada. In just over a decade of that marriage, Louise

had seven children by Earl

Little.

Wilfred was the eldest, and there

followed Hilda, Philbert, Malcolm, Reginald, Yvonne, and Robert. The

May 1919 marriage certificate confirms some interest-

Her maiden name is recorded as Louise Norton, even though she had been known as Louise Langdon all of her life. Norton, in fact, was the name recorded on her birth certificate, but Grandmother Gertrude Langdon had followed an Afro-Carib matriarchal tradition in which the mother's lineage is regarded as the only valid one. However, the Norton name on the birth certificate could have been legally changed only by deed poll, and this would have required the

ing facts about Louise's early

father's consent.

name and

life.

Given Gertrude Langdon's pride

in her family

her contempt for Norton, she had obviously chosen to

avoid asking Norton for his consent. As Louise's guardian, she had simply given the child her

own and

her mother's surname.

GHOSTS

132

IN

01 R

BLOOD

Louise Langdon Norton spent two years in Canada, and during that time, a distant

Canadian

her

fair

me, she did odd jobs as

relative told

a shop assistant and a domestic. Her

ability to

work. These years, however, were crucial

to find

speak French and

complexion, the informant told me, obviously helped her in

shaping the rest

North America. But in the rush to embroider details in the life of her famous son, biographers have ignored or passed over many events that shaped her life and, through her, Malcolm's life. But there is also the fact that Louise arrived in Canada already steeped in the lore, the magic, the complex village culture of La Digue, with its codes of morality and its tradition of loyalty to family and place. of her

life

in

Stepping off the gangplank of the ship that brought her to

Montreal, Louise must have seen that in her journey from La Digue she had, in fact, not only sailed thousands of miles north, but had also leaped across centuries.

Langdon, coming from

My

their villages

metropolis like Montreal for the

first

with the same wonder. They must have

about where they would find a city's

monuments

in stone

and

human its

my

father,

aunt, and Louise

and seeing a time, must have viewed it the sun

in

felt

the

same apprehension

sanctuary in the midst of the

towering buildings. For the

first

must have been conscious of being dwarfed, not by cliffs, mountains, and forests but by man-made structures. But they would have brought an invincible certainty of who they were as human beings and instinctively they would have looked not so time, too, they

much

at the structures but at the kaleidoscope of

A

human

faces

would have reassured them that they were still in a human world in which they were living beings. However, people moved around like ciphers and the sound of machines muted their voices. As they entered the intestines of the city, the streets would have grown wider and the buildings taller, more impersonal. around them.

Just as

smile, a nod, a friendly greeting

West Indian

friends

aunt's rescue with their lively

relatives

came

good humor,

their

and

to

my

father

and

volumes of advice,

Jan Carew

133

news from home, Louise's uncle and his friends would have subjected her to the same welcoming ritual. Soon after my father and aunt's arrival, my father got a job with the Canadian Pacific Railway, while she, traumatized by the cold and the daunting business of finding her way in a labyrinth of city streets, left for Tulsa, Oklahoma. She complained that the icy wind in those canyoned streets made her feel as if she were breathing in splinters of glass. She had relatives in Tulsa, and they had arranged and

their eagerness to hear

a job in a hospital for her.

Louise survived the crossing

Although there

worked

in

however,

is

is

much

Montreal soon

after her arrival.

that staying with her uncle, she

the crucial basics of survival in a society in

was

institutional racism

my

aunt did.

so, she

must have

better than

no record of her having done

entirely different

What

is

obvious,

had a crash course in which the format of from the one in her

semifeudal Grenadian society.

compare my father's reaction to racism in Montreal with that of Louise and her uncle. His art was his life, and he felt that the most effective way of answering those who sought to denigrate him because of his color was through his paintings and sculpture. Louise, on the other hand, deeply influenced by her grandmother's teachings and politicized by her uncle, entered the fray directly, and by the time she had married an activist in the Garvey movement they were fully aware of the risks In retrospect,

it is

interesting to

involved in joining the Black liberation struggle. In a

profound sense, both

their lives

and

my

father

and Louise had committed

creative energies to the dangerous cause of freeing

the souls of Black folk

white contempt. His

from the thralldom of racial

spirit

by indifference, while hers constant persecution.

indignities and was crushed slowly and remorselessly was mangled by violence, murder, and

EIGHT We

are the avengers of death. Our race will never be

extinguished while there

A

month had gone by

since

is

light in the

morning

star.

— Popol Vuh

Malcolm's LSE speech and

my final

my habit of writing letters and them had caught up with me. As a result, I was long letter that I had penned to Malcolm but had not

conversations with him, and

neglecting to post left

with a

mailed.

For me, writing I

letters

imagine a postman

feels

has always been a painful chore.

about going for a walk

after a long

trudging from door to door with a heavy mailbag.

never like the chatty, amusing, and lighthearted ones

from

storytelling

My I

how

day of

letters are

often receive

Mine are invariably long, and my incurable turns them into a kind of anecdotal essay. It

friends.

It's

habit of is

either

this or a businesslike ten-line missive.

Having written

that I'd never posted

assassinated and at

Malcolm and put it aside, I was glad because it would have arrived after he was

this letter to it

would most

likely

have been intercepted. Looking

my letter, I often speculated about the fate of letters from all over must have been written to Malcolm and posted alive but that had arrived after his death. Some of must have eventually reached his wife and the sister

the world that

while he was those letters

still

135

GHOSTS

136

who had most

IN

OUR BLOOD

taken over the leadership of the

likely languishing in

some

OAAU,

secret archive

but others are

where the passage of

time will render them meaningless.

There was also the strange phenomenon that occurs when a relative or friend dies in

another country and you don't actually see

the corpse or attend the funeral.

mind

that

somehow

twilight zone

Rereading

the person

A

vague feeling lingers

in

your

is

permanently suspended

in a

and that of the dead. more than two decades later, I

between the world of the

my

unposted

letter

living

could not help thinking of the hundreds of intimate questions

would

like

conversations,

we had both avoided

of fears, doubts, macabre have had to play Boswell

I

Malcolm. For despite our lengthy

to have asked

to his

revealing an infinite

and private longings.

fantasies,

Johnson

number of

for a

number would

I

years in

order to plumb depths that the short time of our acquaintance had never allowed us to do. In retrospect, I'm particularly sorry that didn't talk about the

women

in his

life,

because the

way

in

we

which

men in general, but Black men in particular, talk about women when no females are within earshot tells you a great deal more about the men themselves than about the women they're discussing. I'd been tempted several times to ask Malcolm about his days as

an outlaw and about

how

his being a father

and loving husband

squared with his decision to die for the cause he believed passionately. But

I

in so

never had the chance.

58 Ridgeway Place

London

SW

19

Dear Malcolm,

Your

visit

you'd never

we

was left.

all

too short, but folks speak about you as though

During our

me

talks, so

much was

left

out,

and before

had and your two recent visits to Britain, is that you're keen on finding out more about the West Indian side of your family history. There are a lot of Grenadians parted you'd asked

to write.

that one of the results of our meeting,

I

the distinct impression

Jan Carew

137

here in Britain, and I've already asked

some of

the older folk

among them to find out what they can about your mother's You also asked me to tell you more about my own background, so But

let

me

I'll

do that

some

in

after

family

detail for you. I

gave up the editorship of

your departure. The

moment the chaps who'd

begin with current events.

Magnet shortly

family.

put up the funds to launch the paper saw that

it

was

a success, they

went behind my back and tried to sell it to a large corporation. Such are the foibles of the Black struggle! Pious rhetoric in public, greed and betrayal in private! You'll notice from the enclosed copy that they attacked you in the first issue after I left. They're trying to suck up to the white establishment, but they're doing it in such a sleazy fashion that no one's taking them seriously. They don't seem to realize that Uncle Toming from the heart has to be done according to established rules, the first and most important being that you must not appear to be doing it. A group of us had formed a cooperative, and we tried to buy Magnet, but we couldn't raise enough money. What a pity! The dark million in this country deserve better than a badly written, badly produced, and craven rag. In that illuminating LSE speech of yours, you moved the political discourse from nationalism to internationalism, and from civil rights to

human

rights.

You

stated categorically that the struggle

must be moved into an international arena so that it becomes internationalized rather than ghettoized. Listening to you I remembered a passage from Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism. Talking about the victims of racism and colonialism, he said, "I am talking of millions of men against racism and colonialism

who

have been

skillfully injected

trepidation, servility, despair short,

with

fear, inferiority

and abasement." Your

complexes, visits

were

but your words will echo and reecho in the minds of

generations of Black folk in this country.

You had asked me

you more about myself, but I could It was more urgent, more hear your story. You said that you wished you had to

tell

only give you snippets of information.

important to

had

my

formal education. Well,

isn't that strange,

because,

I

envy

GHOSTS

38 you your

life

IN

OUR BLOOD

as an outlaw, your conversion to Islam, your austere

and your single-mindedness. Your asceticism, your unLord of Worlds, had an almost mesmeric effect on me, and how I wished that I could embrace a religion with the same passion and certainty! But I also lifestyle,

flinching belief in an omnipotent Allah, the

have to admit to myself that a

lot of these longings to

be like you

and illusory. I have a third, iconoclastic, intellectual, and Doubting Thomas eye that invariably topples gods from their pedestals, that vivisects certainties, and that adds complexity to are romantic

what, on the surface, seems simple. Alas,

cannot be me, and even internal contradictions I

if

I

we could meld

would

cannot be you, and you the

two

selves into one,

tear the hybrid creation apart.

sensed that by wanting to hear about

my life in Guyana

and

my

experiences abroad, you were acknowledging a need to find out the West Indian part of you. One of the things that me after you left is this: your mother had immigrated to Canada during World War I, and so had my father. They might

more about occurred to

Who knows?

remember his telling me how the ship taking him from Georgetown to Halifax had stopped at several islands along the way, and how they had to have traveled on the same ship.

I

dodge German submarines, particularly in that long run between Cape Hateras and Nova Scotia. He also told me that he had been called up to serve in the Canadian army but had, mercifully, failed the medical examination. You see, the story of West Indian migrations has a sameness to

it.

grew up in a village on the Guyana coast. This village with its rainbow array of peoples African, Amerindian, Hindu, Muslim, Portuguese, Creoles of every shade was called Agricola Rome. My grandfather was a schoolmaster in Agricola. When he died, my mother, who was a schoolteacher, found life in Agricola stultifyone was a ing, so she wrote to her brothers in the United States I

—

—

—

lawyer and the other a Wesleyan minister

our move to

New

York.

My

— and they sponsored

father had already spent years in the

and Canada and was not keen on returning, but my mother's word was law in the family and he simply toed the line when she brushed aside his objections. Stephanie, my eldest sister, was seven, U.S.

Jan Carew I

was

139

and Maudie, the youngest, was two, when we migrated

five,

to the States.

Rome would

Agricola

have been

like the village

where your

mother grew up in rural Grenada. These villages sprang up all over and the Guyanas after slavery was abolished. It was

the Caribbean

Du

Africans,

Bois

village as a viable

who

tells us,

in ancient times first created the

communal and

social unit.

So our Creolized

African ancestors, dipping into a pool of primordial memories,

began setting up

Once and and

villages as

soon as they had

set

up

their

own governmental

their freedom.

a village chairman,

all

of

hierarchy with a village council

whom were

appointed. That official

hierarchy, of course, included a magistrate

On

won

the villages were set up, the colonial authorities stepped in

and

a police sergeant.

the other hand, the people, while paying lip service to the

officially

healers,

anointed leaders, had their

and teachers. The

priests,

own

sole

secret hierarchy of

authority figure they

all others was the village schoolmaster or schoolThey accorded to that person a reverence that bordered on awe. They were convinced that through education they could win for themselves a second emancipation and, this time, an absolute freedom from ignorance, poverty, and racial contempt. It was this tradition that shaped your mother's views when she was growing up in La Digue. My maternal grandfather, the village schoolmaster, was a tall, commanding figure, and when he walked down the main street of the village, even the most cantankerous and loudmouthed of the rum shop denizens would lower their voices and tip their hats. He taught me my first anticolonial lessons, and my first lessons in

recognized above mistress.

racial pride.

My

died before

was born, but

I

and a portrait

in the living

My grandfather hear

maternal grandmother, the schoolmaster's wife, the stories

room kept

had a voice

I

constantly heard about her

her alive in

like the roll of

my imagination.

drums, and

commanding me from age four onwards

I

can

still

up straight! You're descended from African kings and queens and Carib chieftains!" He was an early African nationalist and insisted on having my mother hang pictures of Hausa-Fulani warriors it

to "Stand

GHOSTS

40

my

above

bed. Their proud

IN

OUR BLOOD

ebony

faces,

snow-white eyeballs,

and pennanted day. The Tarzan

lily-white turbans, decorously caprisoned steeds,

on my mind to this was exposed later were never

lances remain imprinted

images to which these

I

memorable

ones.

My

able to supplant

impressions of Africa were

earliest

shaped by those pictures of Hausa-Fulani cavalrymen. I'm forever

my

grateful to

grandfather for ensuring that those were the images

that were etched

my

After sisters,

and

on

my mind

during very impressionable years.

grandfather's death in 1926, I

migrated to

Morningside Avenue

in

New York. We Harlem, and

I

my

mother, father, two

an apartment on

lived in

can

recall

still

how

every

gray-facaded building on our street looked the same, especially at night

when

lights filtering

through curtains glowed

like tiger's

eyes.

During our second year kidnapped, and

I

in the

remember every

United States, Maudie was

detail of that

drama.

It

was

cool afternoon and sunlight flooded the street after a cloudy

a

spell.

My two sisters and I were playing on the sidewalk, and my mother would check on us every now and then from an open second-floor window. A red car drove up and a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat that sat on his head like a doll's house rushed out, grabbed Maudie, bundled her into the red car, and sped away. Only after the red car had disappeared around the corner did Stephanie and I find our voices and call out to our mother. After Maudie's disappearance, Stephanie and I were immediately shipped

back to Georgetown, Guyana's

capital.

My

dis-

traught parents did everything possible to find Maudie, but they

never did.

A year later, though, when they were certain that they'd

never see her again, a close Guyanese friend of

my

mother's saw

Maudie playing on the beach in Florida, recognized her, and called the police. There was a surprising twist to Maudie's return to the family fold, because the woman who had paid two men to kidnap her had actually treated her so well that she cried for days,

"wanted to go back to Mama." Young Maudie was, and innocent, my mother still never forgave her for

protesting loudly that she as

transferring her affection to a kidnapper.

Jan Carew

Back

Aunt

in

Georgetown

Harriet,

my

141

my sisters and I spent a year and a half with

mother's eldest

sister.

She had married the

Reverend Marcellus Joseph, a Wesleyan minister. His midnight complexion contrasted with her high yellow one. "Ebony and white pine," malicious members of the congregation would whis-

was concerned, class and status were always more important than color, and Uncle Marcellus, who had studied at a seminary in England, was a per behind their backs. But as far as Aunt Harriet

respected

When

man

of the cloth.

Uncle Marcellus was transferred to Suriname, Aunt

Harriet took us along with them to Paramaribo, where

we

lived in

a large Wesleyan manse. To get there, we sailed along the South American coast in a ship that rolled and heaved and pitched until my stomach was vacuumed of all its contents. I remember Uncle Marcellus telling us that in Suriname we'd be closer to Africa than we were in Guyana, and I understood what he was saying on my first visit to the market in Paramaribo. I remember going to that noisy, colorful market with a maid whose father was a Maroon

and whose mother was Amerindian. She bargained with Maroon exchanged banter, and now and then spoke in whispers. Those Maroons, whose ancestors had been captured in Africa and brought to Suriname as slaves, had fought and won hagglers, laughed,

their

freedom from slavery two centuries before. They also success-

fully transplanted their African

languages and cultures in the

Americas. Theirs was a culture of resistance to tyranny and, at the

same time, one that simultaneously affirmed the genius of the African peoples and their humanity. The Maroon communities that those suffering from overdoses of racial chauvinism and cultural myopia dismiss as being "backward" are still, in fact, some of the most creative in the Americas. A collective artistic expression music, song, complex rituals, dance, sculpture, concepts of how the human world was first created with a diverse array of communities living in harmony with one another and with nature is as much a part of the Maroon cosmology as the breath

—

—

of

life. If,

as the descendants of slaves,

ourselves, then

we need to take

a

we hold

new look

distorted images of

at ourselves

through the

GHOSTS

142

IN

OIR BLOOD

eyes of these brothers and sisters

who

corrected those distortions

centuries ago.

That maid, once she was around her Maroon friends and relatives, relaxed and was no longer the straight-laced young

woman who had been brought up by Moravian missionaries. As she led me from one stall to the other, the market became a magical was rainbowed with color, alive with voices and pulsing It was a place where dreams and reality collided and touched the most prosaic of objects with magic. She pointed out place that

with

life.

the vendors

perfumed

who were

qu'ille

selling potent love potions extracted

blossoms. Exquisitely carved

ladles, doors, paddles, furniture,

design

was

different.

Then

and every

wooden

intricately

from

dishes,

wrought

there were herbs that could cure fevers;

poultices that could soften bones

and make bowed

legs straight;

even herbal medicines that could resuscitate a heart that had

stopped beating. After that the

visit to

the market,

I

could always spot

Maroons in the city, not only by their distinctive African attire way in which they walked in single file as though

but by the

following a forest

We had

trail.

hardly spent a year and a half in Paramaribo

gentle, soft-spoken

Uncle Marcellus died in his

again the unkind, tossing ship plowed

its

sleep,

when our and once

way along the coast of the

Guyanas and took us back to Georgetown. After a year of widowhood, Aunt Harriet announced that she was about to get married again, this time to a Moravian minister. This meant that my parents had to return from the United States posthaste. I grew up being constantly regaled with stories about the racial discrimination my parents had faced in North America. I remember my mother lamenting again and again that in America, although she was earning good money, she often found herself "drowning in a wide indifference." She worked as a housekeeper for a rich white family, and her employers didn't mind her going to night classes at Columbia University to study home economics. During the same period, my father studied dentistry at a southern black university, and spent a few days with us every couple of months.

He often joked about the

Jan Carew

143

odd jobs he had done. He claimed that one of his most macabre jobs had been with a mortician who sold Black corpses to

variety of

teaching hospitals.

My

mother liked to

tell

this

story about the

boarded a bus south of the Mason-Dixon often that

I

came

to

know

it

line.

time she

first

She repeated

it

so

by heart.

and sat down in the first vacant seat my eyes uncouth human-beast of a bus driver called me names and ordered me to the back of the bus. I couldn't believe my ears! And you know something, for the first time in my life, I felt that I wanted to kill another human being, but I thought about my children and the good-for-nothing father I'd have to leave them with, so I kept my anger in check and moved. But it was there and then that I decided that pride and poverty were better than money and bile rising up in your throat to choke you every time one of those human-beasts decided to mash up your pride and fling insult and injury in your face." My mother said that the couple she worked for was so busy living it up that they had no time for their two children. So the boy and the girl the boy was four and his sister eight were left entirely in her hands. When my mother broke the news that her eldest sister, who was looking after us, was about to get married and she would therefore have to return to Guyana, the family offered to pay our passages back to the U.S. and to underwrite all the costs of our upbringing and education. But my mother was congenitally unsuited to being a servant. Besides, there was a wild, reckless streak in her, and she hated being tied down anywhere for long. She dramatized the whole affair by declaring, "It's better to "I paid

my

lighted on.

fare

Then

this

—

—

catch hell in 'brutish ghenna' (her derisory

Guyana) than

British

heaven!

What

name

to live as a servant in the

a place that

Yankeeland

is!

for her native

Yankeeman's

Millions of people

—you don't know them from Adam, and they don't —and yet they hate you because of the color of your

around you

know you

skin! Friends

believe

My

them

just

had told me what until

I

to expect beforehand, but

I

didn't

actually set foot there."

father eventually graduated as a dentist,

and

this

was

after

GHOSTS

144

IN

being persistently badgered by

When

OIR BLOOD

my mother

to complete his studies.

he returned to Guyana, however, he never practiced denThis was the

tistry for a single day.

first

time that he had dared to

my mother. The second rebellion that he was when he returned from abroad for the last time, withdrew into himself, sat on the veranda for months smoking his rebel openly against

staged

ornate pipe, and willed himself to die.

He

claimed that during his

had developed

a

final

months

as a dental student, he

phobia about staring into the open mouths of an

endless stream of patients. In his imagination, those cavernous,

mouths would grow

putrid-smelling to

larger

and

larger, threatening

swallow him.

He chose

my and

instead to be a tailor, a sculptor,

mother was concerned,

tailoring

shops were places where

tailor

good-for-nothings congregated.

was

all

And

and an

artist.

As

far as

a lower-class profession,

kinds of ne'er-do-wells and

as for painting

and sculpture,

left to carpenters and master them from more useful and responsible activities like designing, building, and decorating houses would inevitably lead to a form of delinquency. My mother often swore that if she'd known beforehand that my father had been apprenticed to a tailor as a young man, that he'd painted designs on carriages and was a skilled woodcarver, she would never have

these were activities that should be builders because to separate

married him.

"He's a secretive man," she would lament, "and there are times

when even

Jesus of Nazareth couldn't

closed Carib

The

mind of

his."

final secret that he'd

Catholic faith

all

when he asked

of his

lit

Mantop's breath blew

When

it

suited her,

and bad, to the

my

kept from her

life

it

—that he'd held on to

—was revealed only on

her to fetch a priest.

prayers in Latin, and

what's going on in that

tell

a candle that

his

his

deathbed

priest

came, mumbled

burned by

his bedside until

The

out.

my mother would

attribute everything,

different bloods that ran in

good

my father's veins and, of

and mine. She'd say, "Secretiveness, a heavy burden of patience, laughter as some kind of salve to cover up the

course, in

sister's

145

Jan Carew pain that's biting inside our inherited

from our

devil's

bellies,

and stubborn hope are what we

cauldron of ancestral bloods."

When she was angry with me and I tried to make myself scarce, she'd summon me and say, "You're standing there quiet as a mouse and looking

you fool yourself that I can't hear you thinking. You're growing up to be just like your father, contrite, but don't

always burying thoughts deep inside your mind! You're not burying any thoughts with

me around,

name she gave me when she was slap would accompany the name. If I did well at school, this was

Mister

Man!" That was the

really angry, and, invariably, a

attributed to our Jewish blood;

but she'd add a rider to her praise, saying,

"Book

learning and

lifemanship are two different things. Jews are supposed to be clever

and good at making money, but we had a lot of clever people in this family and not one of them ever made any money to speak of. Besides, those

who managed

to

make

a

little

money could

never

and break the tradition by mastering the book So learning and having some glue in your palms." Stubbornness and duplicity were blamed on our English blood: "How else do you think the English were able to grab an empire and vampire its riches for so long?" she'd ask, raising her eyes toward the heavens, and then she'd answer the question. "They had to lie and cheat and steal whole countries, and they learned how to do this in their cradles. God knows, if we could drain some of the unwanted blood out of my veins, the English blood would be hold on to

the

first

try

it.

to go.

man who came fire

give

And

between the

him

as for the Scottish blood, that first

to Berbice legs of

his due,

was anxious

women

to dip his

wick and

light a

of every color and shade. But to

once he settled down, he founded a school,

gathered his brood of bastards around him, and saw to all

Robertson

it

that they

got a solid education.

The English hated him, and he hated them

And anyone

the English hated qualified as a candidate

right back.

for his friendship."

Everything

my

father did turned out to be successful at

financial success invariably

first,

but

brought on moods of grim depression

and bouts of melancholy. As

a result, all of his enterprises

GHOSTS

146

V\

01 R BLOOD

owning a general store in Georgetown, working as a tailor and abandoning this to become a gentleman farmer all simply died from neglect. As he grew older, woodcarving and graphic art became his twin passions. However, he never tried to sell a single one of his works, and if anyone offered to pay him for one of his drawings he'd refuse the money and give it to them free of charge.

—

On

money he could

the other hand, with

ill

pay

afford, he'd

cartmen to transport driftwood from the seashore to our backyard

and with

chisel

and hammer

call

fourth faces, fluid shapes, twisted,

writhing arms and legs and snakes coiling around naked bodies.

He

never finished any of the carvings he started. As soon as a

new

abandoned the one on which he was working and gave this newly installed piece his full attention. He'd walk around it and touch it and run his fingertips along the grain of the wood until he found the exact spot where he would probe with his hammer and chisel. On moonlight nights, the backyard became a magical place with demon shapes and dark blue shadows. Once, when I could not sleep, I looked out of the window and saw my piece of driftwood arrived, he

father standing in the midst of his magical, petrified garden.

the clock strike two, but he did not move. His

dew-spangled grass, and he could have been a a strange and secret ritual.

out

softly,

"Come

I

I

heard

shadow striped the Shaman performing

remember hearing my mother

calling

to bed, Alan, you'll catch cold standing in that

morning dew!" The gentleness in her voice surprised me. I had never heard her speak to him with such tenderness and affection. And I thought,

early

"Perhaps they both

live a secret life in the early

morning, one that was hidden from

removed from her daytime criticism of I

my

gone on

sisters

and

ritual of carping, disapproval,

father's every thought,

realize that I've

me and my

hours of the

a bit

far

and

word, and deed."

about

my

family, but family

They can take on a life of their own. The racial situation here in Britain is going from bad to worse. The other morning when the sun was out and I was walking down the Wimbledon High Street with a friend, a car slowed down and two men began screaming, "Nigger, go back to your jungle!" and stories are like that.

Jan Carew then they sped away. it

was

as

if

those

Do you know, on

147 that clear bright morning,

two human-beasts had polluted

the air with their

insane hatred.

remembered your idea of having a register listing Blacks in the world with professional skills, and I've been jotting down names since you left. I hope that the OAAU is going from strength to strength. I

everywhere

Warmest fraternal greetings, Jan

NINE His face his

drum

is

on the earth

is silent

In the cold

.

.

dark earth

time plants seeds of anger.

—Martin Carter, "Death of a Slave"

After

talking to Wilfred

on many occasions,

I

was most im-

pressed by his quiet strength and his dedication to serving the

community. In his seventies, he was still doing what he had done for most of his adult life helping young people in Detroit to realize their full potential. He had served for years as a Muslim minister and had then been employed by Michigan Bell, where,

—

with only a high school education, he had risen steadily in the

When he retired, the company and the commuhad honored him. He was a "big brother" not only within his family, but for the community as a whole. "There are some white people at the top who will recognize intelligence, no matter what color it is," he said, "but the disadvantaged whites and Blacks are being manipulated from the summit of a pyramid and encouraged to rival one another. If the poor whites and poor Blacks could ever unite for the same cause, they would overcome their oppression in no time."

corporate ranks. nity

"How

did you start working for Michigan Bell?"

149

I

asked,

GHOSTS

150

I\

01 R BLOOD

intrigued by the switch from being a

Muslim

minister to joining the

ranks of corporate America.

young man whom I coached for his interview, and after he got the job with Michigan Bell, the personnel manager complimented him on the way in which he conducted himself during the interview. 'Well, to tell you the truth,' this young man said, 'a friend named Wilfred Little coached me.' That was a time when they were interested in employing more Blacks in the company, so this personnel man said, 'This Wilfred Little should be working for us. You should try and persuade him to come and see me.' So I went to see this man, and when I took the tests I came out at the top of the group of applicants, although all of them had more formal education than I had. I got the job, and I would have "There was

this

risen higher in the

job

I

ever

had

in

company

my life,

I

if I

gave

hadn't started so late in all I

had into doing

life.

Every

it."

had learned during my wide-ranging conversations with Wilfred that asking the odd question every now and then was the best way of triggering a flow of random but illuminating reminiscences. Speaking in his calm fashion, either face to face or on the I

phone, he would, over time,

fill

Once he began

in

gaps that remained after our

would

him range back and forth, from his earliest recollections of his mother and of Malcolm, to past and present happenings in his own life. The

previous talks.

talking,

I

let

absence of a rigidly structured time frame that placed everything

in

chronological order proved just as rewarding as the talks with

Tanta Bess had been. Once, almost as an aside, Wilfred had slipped in an important and intriguing piece of information. He told me that Marcus Garvey had visited their home on a few occasions.

"What

did he look like?"

I

asked him.

was young, almost a child, and my memory of him isn't clear. But he was a big man and when he spoke he had that Jamaican accent. What I remember more clearly, though, is that my mother told me that the aide traveling with Garvey was her cousin. That aide accompanied him wherever he went and I'm sure that from the way he looked, he must have had Indian blood. But I must tell you "I

Jan Carew that in

151

when Garvey was on the run from the

our house and wrote

FBI,

and dispatched

letters

my mother hid him had a

for him. She

good education and could write clearly and well; and a couple of times she received commendations from the leaders of the

UNIA

thanking her for the good work she had done for that movement."

Then, with hardly a pause, he switched to an entirely different topic and declared, "Malcolm demanded attention from the day he was born. I remember that when my mother brought him home

from the hospital off,

and

in

Omaha, Nebraska, he used

my mother would say,

to

bawl

his

head

'Wilfred, give this child the bottle,

I

him the way he wants me to,' and with Malcolm red in the face and making himself heard, she'd say, 'This one is going to grow up to talk to people.' She had a way of forecasting what each of us would do from early on, and every one of her predictions came out just like she said." "What did she predict that you would do?" I asked. don't have enough milk to breastfeed

"She said that

in

my

quiet way, I'd always be helping those in

need. I'm a careful person, never

— repay

owed

a debt in

my life that I didn't

"You must have done something reckless in your youth," I said. He laughed and confessed, "I'll tell you what the most reckless thing I did was. When I was a boy, we had a neighbor who made fifty-gallon barrels of cherry wine.

It

would

start

out as cherry juice

because the old folks used to say that cherry juice was good for people suffering from rheumatism.

When

that juice fermented,

it

became cherry wine, and they claimed that that was good for rheumatism, too. So when people knew that it was ready they would come, and you would think there was nothing in the world like cherry wine. 'Oh, it's so great!' they'd say. So, I wondered, if this stuff

is

so great,

shouldn't drink

it?

how come

So one day

I

they keep saying that children

figured out

some. There's a weed that grows out straight

and

it

in the field;

and has some greenery on top of

dries, the inside of

against something

and

a long drinking straw.

it.

going to get it

When you

has some cottony

stuff,

grows up

break

it

off

but you hit

it

that white stuff comes out, and you have went down into the neighbor's basement,

all I

it

how I was

GHOSTS

152 inserted

my

IN

01 R

BLOOD

straw into the barrel, and sucked away.

tasted good! I'd go

sit

down

a while

and

And

boy,

it

and then go back and go back upstairs, I could

rest,

some more. When I finally got ready to make it up the stairs. When I did make it, and came out into our kitchen, my mother looked at me and asked, 'What's wrong with you?' She could see that something was wrong, but I managed to stagger to my room, and every time I looked at my bed it seemed to be moving. I got next to it where I could feel it and just fell over and went to sleep. Next morning when I woke up, I drank some water, and by drinking that water I was drunk again. So my mother got me straightened out that day, but I told her she would never have to worry about me and that stuff anymore. I've stayed away from alcohol ever since. People used to laugh at me, but I just didn't get

hardly

care." I

"You and Malcolm were

said to myself,

opposites, Wilfred.

You moved through life at a steady pace, always testing the ground before you moved forward, but he was reckless, where you were cautious. He wanted to fly like the wind." As in

if

my

reading

my thoughts,

Wilfred said, "I've met a

of anyone

ever

I

before the words had

left

people

your mouth, he had grasped the

That was the way he was. He could saying, right to the heart of

they give you into the real

Out

all this

it.

see right into

He found

it is

a

out early that in schools

idealism and everything, but

whole

in that real,

different

way

when you

that this world

it's

is

get out it,

you

run out

white-male-dominated world, there's lying

and deceiving, cheating and murder, and one of the other. So

idea.

what you were

world where Black folks are always up against

find out that there.

lot of

Malcolm had the quickest mind met. His mind worked like lightning. Almost

lifetime, but I'm telling you,

not what people think

illusion piled

on top

and the masses are How do you think that

it is,

being manipulated and don't even know it. you can convince thousands of young men to go and give their lives for some patriotic reason, when all it boils down to is that they're being sent to protect somebody's interest and to take control of someone else's resources? Malcolm found this out earlier than most. He knew from the inside how the svstem works. He studied

Jan Carew everything from the inside.

never have

known

it

If

he saw just the outside, he would

way he

the

out and told the truth about

153

it

and he couldn't have spoken

did,

the

way he

could stand at a street corner in any city and

was going on, who

that

Malcolm

did either. tell

you every hustle

was doing what, which cops were on the

who the undercover cops were. He could read the happenings city like a book. He was paroled to me when he was released

take, in a

from prison. People often ask, 'Which one of the family was he closest to?' Well, he

confide in

me

was close to

because he

stop there, so he

knew

felt like

of us in different ways. But he'd

all

that whatever he told

he could

tell

me

me would

anything, even his

I would try and dissuade him, but he had mind on doing, and he knew I was always there for him. Many times he would tell me, 'If you ever hear that I'm in jail, come and bail me out, because if you leave me in there, they'll find somebody to frame me for whatever they want to charge me with. They know that they can pick me up and hold me in jail for three days with no charge, and if they didn't charge me

wrongdoings. Sometimes to

do what he

set his

during that time, they'd have to release me.' So he'd get caught in

White people would come to Anything they wanted, he knew where to get it for them. Every now and then, they'd run a raid on those places and take him to jail, but he'd get word to me,

those places where he

would

hustle.

those joints to buy marijuana and

and

I'd

stuff.

go and get him out right away. As

didn't really start having problems until

he was around seventeen.

I

far as

I

can remember, he

and getting involved

always

felt

that he'd

in things

wake up one

day and walk away from that gangster world, and prison did for him.

He

didn't just serve time, he let time serve him.

this

When

he

was paroled to me, I got him a job in the furniture store where I was working. I remember that when he held the first paycheck in his hand, he turned to me in amazement and said, 'I could earn this in five minutes on the street.' But he moved forward and never looked back. You know, every now and then, when fame had caught up with him, he'd talk to an all-Black audience when there were no whites in sight, and he would get right down to business. 'Now listen,' he would say, 'there's nobody here but us, so we're going to

GHOSTS

54

have a good old down-home

uncouth they were

—

OIR BLOOD

IN

talk.'

yes, he'd use

would show them how

Then he would tell them how the word 'uncouth' and he

—

they perpetrated against themselves and their all

power

the time

overcome

to it's

'I

can't

do

in.

a family legacy to go into the

I still

this,

and

can do

if

get I

A

so brainwashed! really

tell

their problems. That's

show young people how themselves

had were things them that they had it in

a lot of the problems they

we

to rise

can't

do

I

tell

students

community and

try to

above the conditions they find

mad when one that,

them comes and tells me, because I'm Black.' We've been

we

lot of things

why

of

accept that

we

can't do,

we

try."

Once, when Wilfred had said something about "the mystical

Muslim?" "I'm a believer in Islam" was his rejoinder, and I understood that he was making it clear that he wanted to distance himself from the movement that Elijah Muhammad had started and to which he had devoted so many years of his life, so much of his energies, and the quiet dedication that was as much a part of him as the sweat in side of Islam,"

I

asked, "Are you

still

a

his pores.

"You were

a Black

Muslim

in the early days, before

burst on the scene, weren't you?" "I'll tell

you how

I

became

a

I

Malcolm

asked.

Muslim. There was a guy

helped, and he said to me, 'You must be a Muslim.'

I

who

I

never heard

I asked him where these Muslims were and he told me. I went there and liked what they were saying, and I joined up. But it was a small movement then. It took Malcolm to make it a nationwide movement, to found the newspaper, to create the Fruit of Islam, though some of the people he

about Muslims before, so located,

on him and powerful, then

recruited turned

like vipers.

rich

jealousies

little

men who

Malcolm made began creeping

the in.

movement

There were

Malcolm being a national and warn him about what

couldn't bear the idea of

and international

figure.

I

used to try

—

was going on, but he wouldn't listen "Malcolm was a reincarnated Othello surrounded by Iagos,"

I

thought, and Wilfred's voice continued.

"When

he broke with Elijah

Muhammad,

he came to see me,

Jan Carew

and when he stepped

155

had never seen him looking so devastated. It was as if someone close to him had died. I saw him after all of his trips abroad except the last one. After that last trip, he only told me what had happened in France." "During our talks at the Mount Royal Hotel in London, he told me that the forces stalking him at every turn were too big to be just the followers of Elijah Muhammad," I said, and he agreed immedioff that plane,

I

ately,

"Oh, of

it

yes, there's

when he was

no question of

it.

He became

especially

traveling in Africa. Nasser tried to see to

aware it

that

was enough protection to ensure that he didn't fall victim to some of their schemes. Malcolm knew that there was much more to it than just Black Muslims looking for revenge. Some of the ordinary folk who worked for American diplomats would tip him off. Lots of times, the ordinary folk working for those diplomats, cleaning up and doing things like that, would hear them discussing there

things.

So those very folk

would be

who

they thought didn't

know

anything

and they'd put the word out as to what was being discussed: that there were higher-ups in America who wanted to see Malcolm eliminated, because they didn't want him hauling them before the United Nations. He wasn't hiding the fact listening,

do it, and they knew that he knew how to do it. him when he and Martin were getting together and when some world leaders were reaching out to help him.

that he intended to

Besides, they killed

Afterwards, they sent their people around Africa to try and sully his

name. But the name of Malcolm

The

last

time

I

X still lives."

saw Malcolm X, he was

in the

lobby of the

Mount

Royal Hotel, surrounded by reporters, leaders of the Council of African Organizations and a bevy of

camp

followers.

We

greeted

each other fleetingly. There was a handshake, a smile, and a hasty reminder,

"Remember to send those things to me," he said, hurrying away, and not looking back. He was assassinated ten days later.

About the Author

Born

in

Guyana

in

1925, Jan Carew

is

a novelist, poet, playwright,

and historian. Currently the director of the Center for the Comparative Study of the Humanities at Lincoln University, he taught at Northwestern University for fifteen years, where he is now Emeritus Professor of African American and Third World Studies, and previously at Princeton, Rutgers, and George Mason universities. Carew, whose first novel, Black Midas, was a landmark in Caribbean literature, has been an adviser to heads of state in Africa and the Caribbean. A member of the board of the international journal Race and Class, his essay entitled "The Caribbean Writer and Exile" was awarded the 1979-1980 Pushjournalist,

cart Prize.

critic,

Born

in

Guyana

1925, Jan Carew

in

playwright, journalist,

critic,

and

director of the Center for the

is

a novelist, poet,

historian. Currently the

Comparative Study of the

Humanities at Lincoln University, he taught at Northwestern University for fifteen years, where he Emeritus Professor of African-American and

is

now

Third World

Studies, and previously at Princeton, Rutgers, and

George Mason

universities. Carew,

Black Midas, was a landmark

in

whose

has been an adviser to heads of state Caribbean. A journal

member

Race and

bean Writer and

Class, his

Exile"

Distributed

HILL

Cover desi

in Africa

and the

essay entitled "The Carib-

was awarded the 1979-1980

BOOKS

by

Independent Publishers Group

Front cover pi

novel,

of the board of the international

Pushcart Prize.

LAWRENCE

first

Caribbean literature,

interaction with Malcolm in the crucial last "Through reconstruction of and reflection on his deepens our sense of the possible courses that Malcolm's Me

few months of his life, Carew

as a plaster saint or claiming might have taken, while avoiding straightjacketing him

his

symbolic carcass for any doctrinaire program."

—Adolph Reed, Jr., Northwestern University "Every scholar of

ment of

social

the predicaand religious thought, every white American who ponders more about the every Block American who feels the need to know

Block Americans,

history of this great

"Jan Carew ranks

Molcolm X."

man will need and appreciate the scholarship Jon Corew brings to —Nikki Giovanni, author of Racism 101

among the legendary black intellectuals of the twentieth century.

With

Carew combines a sharp intellect with L R. James, Walter Rodney, and George Padmore, change. . . . Carew's observations a passion for political justice and radical democratic Malcolm from block nationalism to and critical analysis shed new light on the evolution of

C.

radical internationalism.''

"Jan's achievements are legion

and

literature, poetry, cut across such diverse fields as politics,

weight of drama, journalism, and teaching. He wears the great of his learning easily. But of course his

most outstanding

we especially honor him, is his resolute and unwavering

DennU Brutm "Thanks to Jan Corew,

finally,

characteristic,

men worthy of true martyrdom."

and the breadth

and the one for which

dedication to the couse of freedom."

Universitv or Colorado, Boulder

the quintessential Malcolm

sensitive, thoughtful, and, ultimately,

his experience

is

recognized for what he was: a

make committed seeker of those paramount truths that

-Vernon Jarrett, Editorial Board, (