Strivers Row (54 page)

And Master Fard had told him the story of Dr. Yakob, the Big Head Scientist, who was the greatest, and most arrogant, of all the great scientists among the Original People, and who had learned how to draw the black germ out of babies through the secret of magnetism. It was Dr. Yakob and his followers who had bred the red man, and the yellow man, and white man, and all the other races, over thousands of years of horrible experiments, in their laboratories on the Isle of Patmos.

Now the black gene Dr. Yakob had drawn out of them was the most dominant gene, being the darkest, and so these white, bleached men had still been little more than animals who lived in caves, and whose women fornicated with dogs. They had not one-third the strength, or the intellect, of the Original People, and they were unclean, and the source of all diseases in the world today. Yet they had come to rule over the Black Man anyway, through their evil new science of Tricknology. They had taken away even the names of the Original People, and called them Negro, which means something dead, and lifeless, and neither this nor that.

They had committed the greatest crime in history, murdering six hundred million of the Original People in the slave trade, and they had wrecked and robbed and spoiled many more, until these were truly no more than white people—Yakob's People—in black skin. Eating swine and other unclean food, and fornicating like beasts, and drinking alcohol. Blaspheming, and fighting their brethren over nonsense, and living on credit, and handouts from the white man's government, forsaking Allah and loving the devil who was their master.

Now when Master Fard had finally finished telling him all that he had to tell him that first night, Elijah was silent. For he knew that every word was true—knew that he had always known it, somewhere deep in his heart. It explained everything. It explained how it was that God was human, and not some indifferent, faraway sky God who had willed it that Black People should be slaughtered, and enslaved, and carried away from their homes into bondage, just so they could hear His word. It explained how the depraved and ignorant white people he had trembled before all his life in Georgia, and here, too, in Detroit, could so much as dare to consider themselves the master race, and impose themselves over all others.

It was all right there, so clear and so simple that Elijah didn't know why he hadn't seen it himself—the answer to everything that had stilled his voice in the pulpit, and rotted out his faith, and made him see the world as nothing more than a cruel accident. Yet still so burdened down by his life in the white man's country was he that when Master Fard had finished speaking, all he could blurt out was the question—

“But how do you know all this?”

“Because I am an Original Man.”

“But you don't look black.”

“The Original People don't look the way the so-called Negroes look today,” Master Fard had told him, the gentle, knowing smile never leaving his lips. “They have straight hair, and fine features. It was only in the jungles of East Asia—what you call
Africa
—where they went to harden themselves for the ordeal to come that the Black Man became coarse of feature, and his nose became wide, and his lips swelled up. It was only there that his hair became kinky and curly, and that he allowed himself to be ruled by his weaker parts.”

“So where you from?” Elijah had blurted out, and was immediately embarrassed by his challenge. But Fard had not seemed bothered by it in the least, as if he were expecting this very question.

“I am the son of Alphonso, from the Koresh tribe, and of Baby Gee, my mother,” he told Elijah. “I was born in Mecca, which is the holiest of cities, and I lived there until I went abroad to study, and received a degree from the university at Oxford, in England, and another degree from the University of Southern California. I have studied history, and mathematics, and astronomy, and the Bible and the Koran. I have traveled for twenty years all around the world, studying the educational system of every civilized nation, and I can speak sixteen different languages, and write in ten. When I arrived here in North America, I was received with honor as a diplomat at the White House, as a distinguished guest of your president, Theodore Roosevelt.”

He stopped for a moment, then smiled almost shyly.

“Do you want me to show you?” he asked.

“Yes, please!” Elijah cried, and he was embarrassed again, afraid that his faith was not sufficient.

But Master Fard had only smiled his same knowing smile, then opened up his mouth and spoken in one language after another. The words going on and on, as easily as if he were just continuing their conversation, and Elijah knew then that it was all true. He felt as if he were basking in the words, all the strange, beautiful sounds that he did not know, but that came tumbling out of the man's mouth like a golden stream. He closed his eyes—and he realized then that his lungs no longer hurt, and that he was able to breathe easily, and was not even thinking of the three beers still left in the kitchen icebox.

Only when Master Fard finally paused had he opened his eyes again, and looked straight at his guest.

“Who are you?” he asked him then, for the first time.

Fard had looked right back at him. His smile gone now.

“My name is not important just yet,” he said. “You may call me Master Wallace D. Fard. But soon, should you prove worthy, I will reveal my real name, and I will give you a new name, as well. For you will be a great prophet, too.”

“I will?” Elijah asked weakly, stunned by Master Fard's words— but realizing at the same time that he had known it all along, that it was something which had always been inside of him.

“Do not think yourself unworthy. I, too, was once like you, wallowing in wickedness, and depravity, a slave to the white man. You have to reach bottom before you can know—before you can lead the people.”

“Let me ask you one thing more,” Elijah had entreated him, though the grimy Black Bottom dawn had already broken through the windows, and Master Fard was standing up to go. Pausing at the doorway to hear Elijah's question, his face as gentle and open as ever.

“Why have you come? Why here, and now, and to me?”

“Haven't you figured it out by now?” Master Fard asked. His smile almost playful now, teasing Elijah as he walked out the door.

“I have come to destroy the world.”

From that night on, Elijah had never felt the need of a drink again. He had smashed his remaining bottles of homemade beer out on the sidewalk that very morning, and gone out again to look for work. It wasn't easy, with the Depression weighing heavily on the great City now, the plants and factories of the white man shutting down. Even the metal-stamping machine down the street had finally fallen silent, and the coal trains no longer whistled by their window.

But somehow, he was able to find enough work to feed his family and get them off the welfare. It was always hard work, but it felt as nothing to him now. He could work all day without being tired, his hands and his lungs no longer hurting. Clara was quietly proud of him again, he could tell, and at the end of the day he would come back and sit in what was now the blessed peace and stillness of his kitchen. Drinking a cool glass of water, or buttermilk there, and thinking on Master Fard and how much he had already changed his life.

In the evenings and on weekends, he went out with the Master and some of his other disciples in his red Chevy coupe, preaching The Knowledge of Self and Others. And every Sunday afternoon, he went to hear the Master speak at the Moorish Science Temple on Hancock Avenue, which was now renamed the Allah Temple of Islam. More and more people pushed in to hear the Master speak every week, even following Master Fard down the street to ask him questions, or just to touch his sleeve. The people coming in such multitudes soon that Elijah thought this was how it must have been in the olden days of the Bible, when Jesus had walked through the Holy Land.

Above all, Elijah was overjoyed to see that the Master's power had spread to him, and that at last he was able to preach again. When he first spoke in the Allah Temple, he had stumbled over words, and mispronounced them, where back in Georgia he had always spoken easily, even glibly, when preaching in the little, piney-woods churches. He was mortified, and glanced over uneasily at Master Fard. But the Master was still smiling serenely at him, and he had recovered himself then, and delivered the most powerful sermon he had ever given.

“Do not be surprised. The truth is harder to speak than lies,” the Master told him afterward, when he had confessed his shame and bewilderment over his stumbling. “People like to think it's hard to lie, but in fact it's easy. That's why so many people do it.”

Soon Elijah was speaking at the Allah Temple every Wednesday and Friday night, and on Sundays when Fard was away on one of his mysterious errands. Every time he spoke, he gained more and more confidence. He had converted all of his close friends, and his family, to become followers of the Honorable Master Fard, so that they looked up to him again, and did as he said. They even looked healthier, and better—their skin shinier and better complected from following Master Fard's dietary rules, which included forsaking the pig, an animal that Fard had told him was part dog, part cat, part rat, and the carrier of 999 poisonous germs.

But it was not only his family who looked up to him now. He could see all the people in the temple nodding at his words—their congregation of bellboys and factory hands, waitresses and laundry workers; reformed drunks and gamblers, thieves and adulterers. All the humbled and the pure of heart, now willing to follow him just as they did Master Fard, and Elijah felt exalted, and glad to be alive for the first time in many years.

One winter evening after services he was alone in the temple with Fard, putting away the prayer books, when he caught a whiff of the distinct, musty smell of churches that he had always loved. Some combination of candle wax, and dust, and onionskin paper that overwhelmed him, and filled him with love for this man who had raised him up from his drunkenness and despair, who had allowed him to preach again in these places he loved so much. He had turned to Fard then, with tears in his eyes. The Master turning, too, to meet his gaze, as he always did, as if he had been anticipating it. Smiling at him in that infinitely gentle way of his, the black pools of his eyes deeper and more compassionate than ever. Elijah asking him directly, at last, the question he had held in abeyance for months—since their very first meeting—but had never dared to broach before:

“Are you the God that's supposed to separate the righteous, and destroy the wicked?”

To his surprise, Fard's gentle demeanor had melted away instantly then, his face turning a deep red color in the candlelight. Elijah amazed again to see just how white he really was, how red his skin could turn when he was angered.

“Now, who would believe that but you?” he had cried, thrusting a warning finger into Elijah's face.

But then the redness and the anger had vanished from Master Fard's face as quickly as it had appeared. The slight, well-dressed man smiling warmly at him again. Touching Elijah affectionately on one cheek, and winking at him.

“When I'm gone, you can say whatever you want about me.”

But after that Elijah had not been able to restrain himself. Asking him again, a few weeks later, when the Master had deigned to visit his home once more:

“You are that one we read in the Bible? That he would come in the Last Day, under the name of Jesus? You are that one?”

The smile had faded from Master Fard's face again, just as it had in the Allah Temple—but this time he had not looked so much angry as very serious, the way the apostles and the saints looked in the Bible pictures. Staring deep into Elijah's eyes for several long minutes, until his pupils seemed to swell, and spin like pinwheels.

“You are ready now,” he had told Elijah finally. “Yes, I am the One, but who knows that but yourself, and be quiet.”

And Fard had given him a new name then, which was Ghulam Bogans, and which he told him meant Slave of God. He had told Elijah that from then on he would be his closest servant, over all others. But he had instructed him not to tell anyone at all, not even in his family, so that Elijah had had to lock himself in the clothes closet at home to keep from blurting out the truth in his ecstasy. Prostrating himself there amidst the family's shoes, and the coats smelling of mothballs, praying to Fard where no one else could hear him. Asking only that he might see the day when he brought forth the kingdom of God on earth, and punished all the white devils.

Then, one Sunday, just before he was about to introduce Master Fard to the temple faithful, Master Fard had turned to face him, as if he could read his mind, and said:

“You want to know something. Go ahead and ask.”

And then Elijah had looked at him very seriously—more seriously than he had ever looked at anyone or anything in his life— and asked him for the third time:

“Who are you, and what is your real name?”

“I am the one the world has been expecting for the past two thousand years,” Master Fard told him this time, without hesitation.

“What is your name?”

“My name is Mahdi. I am God. I came to guide you into the right path, that you may be successful and see the hereafter.”

And when he said those words, Elijah felt as if he had been struck blind. He had to close his eyes, and hold his arm over them in order to keep out all of the glorious golden light that flowed in on his brain. The next thing he knew he was on his knees, and then the Master was lifting him up again, and smiling at him, laying a hand paternally along his cheek.

“You may go ahead and tell them, and I will acknowledge you as my prophet,” he told Elijah.

The next Friday Elijah had walked out onto the speakers' platform, pausing to look over the crowd of janitors and day laborers, maids and short-order cooks. The long unemployed and the half-starved, with their eyes glazed and their cheeks caving in, who had nonetheless given their last two bits to come in out of the cold and hear him preach. He had straightened his suit, and adjusted his bow tie and the maroon fez with the crescent moon, and the star on it— not nervously, just making sure he had everything perfect for the big moment—and then he had said it out loud, for the very first time in public: