Strivers Row (20 page)

“What is all this?” Malcolm asked.

“Why, it's religion, son! The Black Man's natural religion, which is his real heritage,” Prof. Toussaint told him. “I bet you didn't know that all of human civilization started over in Africa.”

“It did?”

“ 'Course it did! Why, everything that we think of as culture, and art and science, and literature, and government and democracy started over in Africa. Practically every week, they're making some new find from the lost civilizations over there. An elephant can't stumble without falling on some white man with a shovel over there, an' what he's digging up. Fossils of the first men! Gold work of such fine tolerance and workmanship that it has no rival! Ancient objects, produced and refined by black hands with results that no human hand today can equal!”

“I never heard about nothin' like that,” Malcolm muttered, embarrassed.

“Sure you haven't! And why is that? Why is that? Because everything you've ever been taught has been by a white man, out of a book written an' published by another white man.”

Prof. Toussaint snatched back the top book in Malcolm's arms, the one entitled
Secrets of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam
. Flipping it open, and shoving it back under Malcolm's nose.

“You see how it is? All the letters, all the words, they're in
black
. All the spaces where there's nothing written, they're
white
. The Black Man been
whited out
of history! You know that's true, don't you? Don't you feel it in your heart?”

“Yes,” Malcolm said slowly, but quietly exultant. Thinking now that he had found it after all, the key to the secret knowledge that he already suspected was all around him.

“Worst crime in human history was the Atlantic slave trade,” Prof. Toussaint continued. “White man shipped millions, tens of millions of people over to build this country for him. All of it, built on the blood and the bones of the Black Man! But even worse— even worse than taking him from his native lands and putting him in bondage—was how he tried to erase our past. To erase his history, so he don't even know his true language, or his religion. Black Man in America today don't know what his real name is, or where he's from, or where he's going!”

Malcolm's mind reeled—so many questions jamming his throat that he couldn't get a word out. But Prof. Toussaint gave off his talk, and frowned suddenly at Malcolm, as if something had just occurred to him.

“Say, you ain't a Christian, are you, boy?”

“No...” Malcolm said tentatively. Remembering his Daddy's stomping, shouting sermons. How scared they had made him feel, and how he had hated his submission.

“Good!” Prof. Toussaint boomed at him, and chuckled. “You see, when a Negro gets the white man's religion, he won't kill so much as a chinch bug. If a chinch bug bites him, he gets up out of bed and prays for that chinch's soul. The white man's religion says, ‘Thou shalt not steal'—but what he means is, don't steal from
him
. He says, ‘Thou shalt not kill'—but what he means is, don't kill
him
. ‘Love your enemy.' You see a lot of lovin' of enemies in this big war the white man's havin' just now?”

Malcolm took a step backward, as staggered by the man's words as he was by the pile of books now reaching up nearly to his chin. He had never heard anything explained so clearly and sharply, at least not since he'd been to his Daddy's Garvey meetings. The words like bright, spinning tops inside his head.

“What's this one?” he asked, holding up the last book, the green one with no title at all on it, just that gold sliver of a moon. His curiosity growing rapidly, like a great, sudden thirst.

“Oh, that's the best one of all. You save that one for last,” Prof. Toussaint told him, distracted, looking down to ring up all of Malcolm's putative purchases on his cash register.

“That'll be two bucks apiece.”

“Two bucks!”

“You know you got it. You know you're just gonna blow it on the numbers or the women anyway,” the older man told him.

Malcolm was about to object again, but looking down he noticed the name on the
Rituals of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam,
as well as several of the others. Elijah Muhammad—one of the same names of the man he had seen, half awake and half asleep, after his night with Miranda.

He paid for them all gladly after that, and took them back at once to the privacy of his room. Not quite ready to go through them yet, laying them all out on his bed so he could simply look at them, just as he had with the suit West Indian Archie had gotten him. Sure that this was the answer to
something
. Thinking over again just who the little man he had seen that night might have been, whether he was real at all or just a dream, a spook from somewhere. He thought that there was something about him that reminded him of his own Daddy, though that frail, light brown man could not have
looked
any less like him. Early Little was built like a workingman, even if he never liked to work much; tall and black as pitch, and missing one eye.

It was more in the way he talked. That soft Georgia touch to his voice, dripping with all those raw, piney crossroads towns Earl's own father had passed through in his days as an itinerant preacher. Reynolds and Butler, Wenona and Cordele, and Millen and Forsythe and Sandersville, and a dozen more. All but indistinguishable from each other, choking on smoke, and sawdust and bile. Places Malcolm had never been, though his first memories were of his father talking about his people down there.

“Your granddaddy wouldn't let me name you after him.”

He was four years old, his Daddy hauling him angrily across a field. His fingers crushed in his father's huge hand, his shoulder feeling as if it were about to be pulled out of its socket. The tall stalks of wild grass scratching his face, and making his eyes water.

“That's right. For all your Momma thinks a you. Your grand-daddy
wanted
me to name you after him, too—you bein' the seventh child, of a seventh son of a preacher. He was prayin' you'd be a boy, so we could call you John.”

Even then, he wasn't sure what his name was supposed to be. Hilda and Philbert called him
Chink,
and a freak of nature, while the other kids on the street called him
Milky,
made him want to cry just to hear it.

“But when you was born, an' I wired 'em that you were as white as Gramma, she
ashamed
. She hates all the white blood in her veins. An' your Grampa John cried when he heard it, an' said he didn't want no
al-bino
grandson named for him!”

His eyes were blue then. His mother liked to say they were sea blue, the way her own had been, though other people told him they looked green, or gray, or brown. His hair was red-blond, and his mother kept it cut so close to his head that it made his face look as round as a pumpkin. She labored over it for hours, trying to comb the curls out with some of Madam Walker's iron combs that she borrowed from a neighbor, heating them up over the kitchen stove until they glowed red. In the bath she would scrub his face and neck so violently he cried—though afterward she would take him over to show off to Mrs. Stohrer next door, telling her proudly,
I can make him look almost white if I bathe him enough.

His mother's hair was straight and shiny black, and sometimes she wore it in a long braid down to her waist. She was slender and tall, and she held herself proudly, and he knew that people were always taking her for white. He had thought it himself one time, when he had looked up from his play in front of the tiny house they rented and wondered who that tall white lady was walking up their street. She liked to tell him that he had been named for her father, who was a prince in Scotland, and who had owned a whole plantation down in Grenada. She told everyone that she had five years of Anglican schooling, and was proud of her accent and her diction, insisting that they call her
Louise,
instead of
Louisa,
which had been her name down in the Islands.

She would even make fun of how little learning her husband had, though Earl would beat her for it, raging at her in his frustration.
Don't you be putting your smooth words on me.
Watching them, Malcolm never understood why she did it—why she couldn't see what was bound to happen when she goaded him like that. Knowing how quick his father was to hit any of them, Wilfred or Philbert or Reginald, or even his sister, Hilda. Whaling away at them with anything, a switch or a belt, or just his big, rough, carpenter's hands.

Except for him. His father almost never beat him—always picking out one of his sisters or brothers unless there was no one else around, or the blind immediacy of his need overcame him.

His mother never hesitated to hit any of them. She would purposely let her anger stoke—sending him out first to cut a good switch for his own beating. He always tried to find one that would break, but when it did she would just send him out for a thicker one, or simply hit him in the back of the head with her hand so hard that it felt as if his skull had been split open.

His only defense was to scream—so much louder and longer than any of the others that she sometimes let him go for fear that the neighbors would hear him. He would run out of the house, shaking his little fist at her. Calling her an old witchy woman and screaming,
“I could kill you, I could kill you!”
—but she would only laugh, her anger sated by then. Once, when he came home from the Pleasant Cove school to show her his raw, reddened palm from where the teacher had made him hold out his hand before she hit him with a ruler as hard as she could, his mother had just shrugged.

“In Anglican school the teacher used to whip our legs,” she told him. “I
liked
it when he did that. When that teacher lashed me, he woke me up. He made me
feel
.”

He spent as much time as he could with his Daddy, who took him everywhere. During the week he hauled him around to the homes of the Baptist congregations he served as a jackleg preacher, letting them lay out something for them both to eat and drink in every household. Proudly standing him up for his hosts on a kitchen chair—boasting that when he was old, all his children would support him.

“I got it figured,” he would say. “Just lookit this little man, you know what he's going to do!”

On Sunday mornings he would take Malcolm with him to meeting. Driving slowly, cautiously through the white neighborhoods in their big old black touring car, peering out the window at the road with his one eye. Sitting Malcolm up in the first pew to listen to his hellfire sermons.

“You better get yourself right with the Lord! That little black train is a-comin', an' you better get your business right!” he thundered at the people in the storefronts and the crude, pine-board churches, and Malcolm would stare, amazed, as his father seemed to become another man right before his eyes—grinning and laughing, jumping and shouting wildly about the pulpit like someone possessed.

“That train take you right to
hell,
you don't get yourself right! An' there won't be no branch lines, won't be no stops. You can ring an' ring on the bell, but the trolley ain't gonna stop, an' once you dead you ain't gettin' off !”

It unnerved him, seeing his Daddy transform himself right out in public like that. Bringing the whole congregation to its feet, singing and clapping their hands, and shouting in joy until Malcolm trembled in terror, wishing he could get down from his pew and crawl away on his hands and knees while they sang their dreadful, threatening hymns—

Must Jesus bear the cross alone,

And all the world go free?

No, there's a cross for everyone,

And there's a cross for me—

He liked the Garvey meetings better—a room full of somber black men, meeting in somebody's drab back parlor or kitchen. There was an air of secrecy about them, the curtains pulled over the windows while they met, their host staring carefully through the keyhole at any new visitors before he let them in. They would listen to his father preach, too, nodding at his every word, though here he was masterful and intense—in firm command of himself, Malcolm thought, outlining for them all the glorious history of their race—

“Since Ham was a Negro, it follows that all his descendants were. That is, the Cushites—or Ethiopians—and the Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. Even the Hebrew people intermarried with the Cushites, so that Jesus is a descendant of Ham, and therefore a Negro. And so is Adam, and Eve—they all black! Whites is only the spawn of Gehazi, the servant who was cursed by the Prophet Elisha with leprosy, and skin as white as snow!”

Malcolm would listen intently to the names of all those ancient peoples. They reminded him of the illustrations of the pyramids, and ancient temples that he had seen in the Sunday color supplements. Then his father would open up the envelope with photographs of Garvey he had brought to sell, and pass them around. Garvey sitting in an open car, wearing that plumed hat and a uniform full of medals and ribbons. Garvey staring wistfully into the distance—

Malcolm had grasped the big, shiny pictures in his little hands, carefully holding them around the edges like his Daddy had taught him, so he wouldn't get his thumbprints on it. Gazing into the huge, ponderous face of the man, while his father told the others how they were not the only ones. How Garvey had followers everywhere— not only in the United States but in the Islands, and even in England, and of course in Africa, where there were millions of black men, waiting to rise at his command. Waiting to rescue the Lost Negroes of North America, and the Islands, and everywhere else, and bring them back home.