Strivers Row (34 page)

Later, after Malcolm watched surreptitiously from the window as Mr. Allen went down the steps of the juvenile home to his big Packard with a spring in his steps—after an enthusiastic good-bye to Ma and Pa Swerlein during which they had all gushed over his progress some more—he was sure that the social worker looked more pleased with himself than he had ever seen him before. He was sure that he could almost hear him, like some costumed super-hero from the radio or the comic books, announcing it—
Well, my work here is done! Another case solved. Boy rescued from his mother!

By the end of the week, holed up in his apartment, he had worked his way through most of the comic books they sold at the drugstore around the corner.

Deep in the back of the store, he found whole boxes full of old comic books, selling at a hundred for a nickel. Most of them defunct serials from a year or two before, full of superheroes who had gone out of existence. Some of them he had read and some he had never heard of, but he didn't really care which, delighted with his find, dropping to his knees right there in the store and riffling happily through them.

There was
Og, Son of Fire,
which was about a caveman, and
Don Dixon and the Hidden Empire,
and
Dr. Hormone,
a scientist who parachuted with his granddaughter, Jane, down into a gorge that took them back through time. There they had slept—and when they awoke, Dr. Hormone possessed the ability to turn men into animals, and to give them all kinds of animal attributes and personalities. He battled the evil Assinoff, whom he had given donkey ears, and the Novaslavians and the Nazians, on behalf of the good and pure Urasians.

But his favorite discovery was Phantasmo, who could do almost anything. He had left America and journeyed all the way to Tibet where, just like Amazing Man, he had learned the very powers of creation from the lamas. He wore a bright yellow costume, but the rest of the time he walked around the streets in a hard-hitting trenchcoat. Phantasmo was able to leave his body and fly on the wings of thought. He could pluck up the Empire State Building and put it on his shoulder, or he could shrink himself until he was small enough to slip down a drain. Bullets couldn't hurt him, and the weight of a mountain could not crush him, even if his corporeal body did appear to drop over dead whenever he went out on a thought mission.

He had read them all blissfully at first. Soaking in his bath, working his way slowly through a fifth of bourbon, and some gage he had scored off one of the whores in his building. Paging through one, splendid dream world after another—when the bottom dropped out, and a low, numbing despair had begun to spread slowly through his whole being. It had wrung the strength out of his limbs, until all he had been able to do was to huddle up in the gray bathwater, wrapping his arms around his legs and rocking slowly back and forth. Whimpering to himself, trying not to listen to the sounds of all the life out on the streets below, the car horns and trains and the people, that usually delighted him so—trying to banish the image of himself alone in this little room, with the vast, oblivious City all around him.

It was then that he had seen him. The same little brown man from the dream he'd had on his first night in Harlem, in his neat dark suit, and the small round hat that was covered with stars, and suns, and crescent moons.
The Prophet
—perched somehow on the edge of the tub, staring at Malcolm with those kind, radiant, knowing eyes, the same gentle smile on his face. Staring at him so intently that Malcolm was certain that he was beckoning to him, just waiting for him to speak so he could answer.

The next thing he knew, he had awakened with his head lolling against the back of the tub, staring dully at the copy of Phantasmo where he had dropped it—the lurid hues of yellow and blue and red leeching out on the soapy skim of the water. He had laid where he was in the tub, letting the water cool around him, until the hazy, summer sunlight had begun to pour through the bathroom window. His head was aching, but to his surprise he found now that the paralysis and the despondency that had coursed through his body like a poison was now entirely vanished.

He mulled over just what he had seen all that day and the next, sure that it was more than just a dream despite all the bourbon, and the tea. Wondering if the little man could really have been there, that he could really have had such a vivid dream. Or, much worse, if it was what he had long dreaded, that what had happened to his mother was now beginning to happen to him.

Movies from heaven,
he remembered that she had called them, toward the end, when she had done nothing except rock back and forth with Butch, the baby, in their Lansing kitchen. Her eyes near to closed most of the time but, every once in a while, always in the evening, staring so wide and urgently that Yvonne had dared to ask her about it.

“Momma, what you seein'?”

And the rest of them had held their breath, because by then she would most likely scream or hit out at them whenever they spoke to her, if she acknowledged them at all. But this time she answered, in a slow, wondering voice,
“Movies from heaven. I'm seein' movies from heaven”
—her eyes closing then, her whole face shutting down.

She had never explained again, or with any greater elaboration, just what she meant, and he dreaded, now, that it might be the same with him if he looked any deeper into his own dreams. But he could not help himself—leafing through the volumes Prof. Toussaint had made him buy down at the bookstore, searching for anything that might help him. He had barely read any real books at all since he had left school, preferring the comics that Mr. Allen had used to win him over, and at first it was difficult for him to get through the long, dense texts, particularly since they were about things that he had never heard of before, in a language that seemed altogether strange and new. He would find his mind wandering, or he would doze off, just as he had over his comics. But soon he began to remember how much he had liked reading, enthralled by all the words; how many there were, and how marvelously they connected and built upon each other. His love for them growing like the sudden revival of something atrophied, some limb or capacity so long neglected he had been unaware that it still existed. He had rushed out to the corner drugstore and bought not another comic book but a dictionary, painstakingly looking up every word he didn't know; even making long lists of other words he came across that he didn't need, but which fascinated him anyhow—studying them until he had them memorized.

He was convinced that here, at last, he had the key to the secrets that were hidden in every nook of the City, on every corner and under every street. He had no more nighttime dreams about the little brown man, but strange, waking visions of his own, all the time now, just walking down the street. He saw words, and events, and even flashes of light that made him stagger on the sidewalk, so that the people around him stared openly, thinking that he must be drunk, or doped up.

He wondered again if he might be going mad, just like his mother. Yet none of the things he saw made him feel low, or crazy, the way she had been for so long. Instead, they filled him with a restlessness to know more and more. It was the same feeling he had had at his father's Garvey meetings, staring at the pictures of the great man and his followers in their uniforms, with their fantastic titles. Remembering the
words
of his father's meetings now, as well as the pictures:

Where is the black man's country? His government, his religion?

He had read, by this time, through nearly all of the books that Prof. Toussaint had sold him. Turning at last to the small, green, anonymous volume with the gold crescent moon on the cover. The book that he had left for last because it looked much less interesting than the others, without a title or author, and almost unused.

But on closer inspection he saw, now, that it was obviously a book someone had taken great care with, its pages all gilt-edged, the type carefully set, and raised. It was the most expensive-looking book that Malcolm had ever held in his hands, including a Bible. Yet the title page read only:

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ELIJAH MUHAMMAD

AS
TOLD
BY
“
X
”

Such a strange title and author, such a strange book in every way, that for a moment Malcolm wondered if it really had been the one he'd bought at Prof. Toussaint's shop, or if it had somehow been substituted by Archie or Sammy, or even one of the other men he shared the apartment with, as some sort of a prank. But he opened it up anyway—being very careful, not wanting to crack the binding, or damage any of the stiff, gilt-edged pages in something that seemed so fragile and expensive. Feeling each word he read down in his bones, as if it were his own story. The excitement growing in him as he recognized himself in the life of the prophet—

He was a frail child, with sleepy, black eyes and a stutter. The son of a preacher, and a mother who believed in dreams. The family growing larger, and poorer every year. Working their way back and forth through the same, mean, piney-wood towns scattered throughout Dooly County, Cordele and Reynolds, Butler and Wenona, and Sandersville, where the soil was the color of rust on an automobile fender, and there always seemed to be the smell of something burning in the air. His father sharecropping and working as a sawmill hand during the week, his mother cleaning white people's houses only to be paid in chitterlings and pig's feet.

He was a good boy. Doing his chores, looking after his younger brother Jarmin, who was close as a twin even though he was seven years younger, and who Elijah always looked out for. Cutting wood with his sisters Lula and Hattie, to sell in town for fifty cents a cord. Reading the family Bible alone for hours, in a corner of the living room, until by the time he was four years old he knew it well enough to be disputatious with his father at the supper table. Willie Poole finally throwing up his hands in exasperation, argued to a standstill in his own kitchen. Telling Elijah's mother,
“You know, that boy gets on my nerves.”

It was only when he talked about God, and the Bible stories, that Elijah's stutter left him. By the time he was fourteen, he had started preaching on his own, bringing grown men and women to Christ, and reducing entire congregations to tears. But for all that, he still didn't believe. He doubted the faith of others, even his father. Willie Poole's sermons drove him to his knees, trembling and shaking in the pew, wanting to go up to the makeshift wooden altar and throw himself at his father's feet like all the others there, begging for forgiveness and salvation.

But he would not submit, and afterward he would wonder what he had been so scared about. He would ask his father, and the other elders and visiting preachers—sitting like Christ and His Disciples themselves at the long, Sunday supper table, set up on the grass behind the church after the service—he would ask them,
What does a black man have to fear from hellfire in this world? What has he done to offend the eye of God?

His father and the visiting churchmen would shout him down— so incensed they knocked over their chairs as they leapt up to denounce him, hollering blasphemy, and sacrilege. But nothing they said could convince him.

The only words from the pulpit that ever spoke to him Elijah heard one Sunday, when Bishop Henry McNeal Turner was riding the county circuit, during the Great War. His Daddy had hitched up the wagon before dawn, and driven them twenty miles, across swollen creeks and down muddy, all but impassable back roads to see the bishop. Arriving at another small, wooden, whitewashed church, out in the middle of a field—full of sharecropper families like their own, some of whom had walked all night to be there.

They were not disappointed. Bishop Turner looking large and forbidding in his splendid black robes, refusing to be contained by the pulpit but stalking back and forth in front of the altar. An old man now, near the end, but still speaking to them in the booming, country-preacher voice of judgment.

“The black man cannot protect a country if the country doesn't protect him,” he had told them. “If, tomorrow, I were to be called to this war, I would not so much as raise a musket to defend a country where my manhood is denied. No, let us ask instead why they want us to fight a war so much.
Remember—a people already invisible can be easily made to disappear!
”

It was simple enough for Elijah to understand what he meant. Everywhere they moved were creeks and swamps, and lakes and patches of woods that everyone knew held the bones of black men—and women and children, too—going all the way back to the Civil War.

The only thing that Elijah didn't understand was the white folks' need for secrecy about it. During the lynching season, the bodies would begin to appear again, hanging from trees along the main roads. No one daring to so much as cut them down and bury the dead, waiting until the white men dumped what was left out in the street of nigger town. He had seen the clothing they stripped off the bodies, cut up into piles of neat little squares at the general store, and sold as souvenirs—right beside the pictures, sold as postcards, they took of the charred, pitiful remnants.

It was the summer after the First War that they had started burning the churches. Elijah was already living in Macon by then, with his wife, Clara—a shy, slender, light brown woman from a Holiness family—and their first two children. His lungs were already strained from toiling in the sawmills and a brick-cleaning factory, but he had worked his way up to tramroad foreman on the Southern Railway. Still hoping vaguely to become a dining room boy, or a Pullman porter someday; still preaching at the humble wood churches out on the road, even though he no longer believed a word he said.

The white men lay in the weeds outside until all the people were inside—until they could hear the singing start. From inside, the people could hear them coming—the heavy clump of their feet beating across the clearing—and they would begin to panic. The white men letting loose with their wild, high-pitched screams as they burst through the doors, and laid about them with baseball bats, and lengths of lead pipe. Punching and kicking anyone they got down on the ground—hanging anyone who could not run from the steeple as the church burned. Their triumphant cries echoing through the field and woods: