Strivers Row (53 page)

“I hope we stay in touch,” he told him—and, “I'm sorry.”

“Me, too,” Jonah had said in turn, squeezing Jack's shoulder, and then he had gone to the train station to meet his ecstatic parents.

That afternoon, they had sat out in the temporary bleachers set up on the great lawn of the college, along with all the other parents. Jonah had paraded past them in his cap and gown with the rest of his class, ordered only by academic rank. All of the graduates were given another handshake from the dean, and handed a small maroon leather book with a graduation program and diploma inside. Then they had lined up around Taylor Lake. Each of them holding the small leather book in one hand, and an unlit torch in the other—waiting while the class valedictorian circled the entire lake, lighting their torches, one by one, with his own.

Jonah's had been lit near the beginning—and while he waited he stared down at the smooth, dark surface of the lake, watching all their reflections as the fire seemed to spread and surge up through the water. The same lake where they had stood with their dates, watching the ice-hockey players at the winter carnival that first year; all the laughing red faces glowing in the light of the bonfires. In the dark water now he could not distinguish Jack Leonard, or Howard Marsden, or any of his other old friends, with their identical black caps and gowns.

The valedictorian finished lighting the torches, and there was nothing left then, save for the grandson of the college's founder to say a few words. He was a tall, severe-looking man—a little stooped with age, with a white moustache and beard cut into a sharp V, and dead blue eyes. The country was already well into the Depression, and his talk was exceptionally bleak. There was little promise of hope, or joy extended, the founder's grandson only lecturing them severely on what little they had to look forward to.

“Do not fool yourselves,” he told them. “Life has stricter rules, harsher judgments, and more cruel limitations than any of you have known here. It is a hard game, and its rules are inexorable.”

When he had finished, all of them knelt down carefully together, as they had been rehearsed, and doused their flames in the lake at the exact same moment.

His college days were ended.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MALCOLM

After he was saved by the ghosty man, he took to staying in both night and day—too rattled to go anywhere anymore. He hit Sammy up for more of his weed in advance, saying he would pay him back but smoking it up himself. He went through as many as twenty of the little matchstick joints in a night, then popped himself back up with some of Sammy's Benzedrine tablets. He felt too jittery now even to pay much attention to his comics, or his dream books, his mind just clicking restlessly through the endless numbers for anything and everything.
Apparel, 016. Arrows, 371. Automobile, 213. Affliction, 590.

He started sleeping whenever he felt like it, keeping the window shades drawn, against all the blank yellow window squares of the endless City, numbing and meaningless in their endless repetition. He knew that he should get back out there, and at least make Archie's collections for him, but after the Collyer house he was no longer sure he even knew what was real anymore.

Wondering, now, if he really was going the way she had. Thinking on something he had been told or had read once, that nobody ever knows they are going crazy. Wondering if it had been that way for her, then— slipping into madness without knowing the difference.

He almost never went outside at all, anymore. He paid his roommates, out of his dwindling money, to bring him back what little food he needed. By then he had lost nearly all track of time, no longer sure if it was even morning or night, save for the pinholes of sunlight that pierced the tattered shades. He had received another letter from his brother Reginald, postmarked from Newport News, and hinting that he would be up in New York in just a few days' time. But Malcolm couldn't even bring himself to do anything about that, to plan where he might go with Reginald, and how he could convince him to jump ship and stay with him, as he had hoped to do before.

He felt as if he were borne down under an unbearable lassitude now, scarcely able to drag himself off the bed. All he was able to do was to tune in the radio, and thumb through the mysterious books from Prof. Toussaint's African National Bookstore. Turning again, as he had known he would, to the small, mysterious volume without any words, any title or author on the cover, only that gold, crescent moon. Opening it once again to the title page, wondering over the words there, which were no less mysterious:

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ELIJAH MUHAMMAD

as told by
“X”

But inside, everything seemed to make more sense now. He wondered if this, too, was a sign that he was going the way of his mother, if before long he would be seeing
movies from heaven
him-self. But he kept reading, more and more avidly as he went on, so enthralled by what was before him on the page that he forgot where he was, the room around him and all of his nameless misery. The words tumbling out as if they had been written just for him—as if it was the story he would have told, the life he had already lived:

He was living in the Black Bottom when he first saw the face of God.

He had been hearing the stories for weeks—all about a small, elegant man who was going door-to-door in a red Chevy coupe, selling bolts of cloth and silk, and talking about the true religion of the Black Man. A man who no one could quite say was black, or white, but who had large black eyes that never blinked, and could see into the depths of your soul. A man who could pluck a hair from his head, and dip it into a glass of water and make ten thousand more hairs sprout from it—and who said that he could destroy the white man's America just as easily.

Elijah had only put it down to more spook stories. He had been wandering through the mills and yards of Detroit for ten years by then. Living down near John R. Street, on the western edge of the Black Bottom, with Clara and the children, and his parents. All of them together in a little house so close to the railroad tracks the coal trains would take your head off if you looked out the window at the wrong time. The floorboards shaking all the time from the hammering of the metal-stamping machines just down the street, the constant rumble of the trucks and trains, and even the planes swooping down from above.

When they had first arrived in the city, he had taken any jobs he could find, at American Motors, and American Wire and Brass, then the American Nut Company, where he worked all day separating by hand steel shavings from the nuts and bolts. All the American companies, anything American, thinking it was a good sign, that maybe he would finally find the real America he had heard so much about. But at the nut company the little metal shards cut into his fingers until they were swollen and bloody, and he had to quit. He had gotten work then as a forge helper over at the Chevy plant, but the white heat of the forge scalded his already weak lungs, and made him cough up black phlegm for hours every night, until he had to quit that, too.

They had been forced to live mostly on Clara's jobs as a maid after that, while he got day work where he could. Stuck down by the train tracks, buffeted all day and night by the reverberation of the ceaseless white man's industry all around him. Dodging the drunken Polack workingmen, who were at least as big and angry as any cracker in Georgia, and who didn't even speak the language. The taste of ash in his mouth all the time, no matter how many bars he took himself to.

It was when he was still a forge helper that Elijah had first started going up into Paradise Valley, the sporting section of the Black Bottom, to try and ease his thirst. Seeking out the cheapest, barest blind pigs along St. Aubin Street or Gratiot, joints that were no more than wood-and-tin shanties with a couple of table-tops propped up on barrels, serving homemade gin and corn liquor to men who couldn't look each other in the face. The booze so bad that, when he woke up the next morning, he was afraid to open his eyes lest he find that he was blind.

He had tried to stop the drinking. He had started going to Garvey meetings, and joined the Ancient Egyptian Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine of North and South America, and the Moorish Science Temple—looking for something, anything he could find that would fill up the hole in him where preaching had been; that could tell him he was something besides one more outof-work Georgia Negro, supported by his wife.

But none of it worked, and before long he had stopped even trying to look for work. He was too ashamed to go home with nothing, even to eat—scrounging instead for food out in back of chili parlors, and fish restaurants. Letting Clara and their five-year-old, Emmanuel, search him out in the bars around their neighborhood. They would always find him and drag him home—a little, brown woman and a little boy, propping up a little man on their shoulders. One night near Christmas they had even found him passed out cold on the railroad tracks, and somehow managed to pull and lift him off before the next one of the coal freights that came hurtling down the track every twelve minutes.

Even after that, he would not stop drinking, until one spring afternoon he had staggered out of another blind pig over in the Eastern Market, just behind Joe Muer's fish restaurant—so drunk that he had fallen down right there, and lain where he was in the muddy back alley. He had awakened around dusk. It was a chilly Michigan night, but he had lain there inured in his inebriation to the cold, content to watch a small colored boy working his way up and down the alley. He was a slight boy, dressed in a raggedy sweater and torn pants and sneakers, hauling a rusted, red toy wagon behind him, and in his drunkenness, Elijah had been transfixed by the sight. He watched as the boy searched systematically through all the alley trash cans—pulling out squares of cardboard, and empty milk bottles, and anything metal that looked as if it might be brass or copper, piling them all into the wagon. He watched, too, as he went through the cans behind Joe Muer's as expertly as any railroad bum, pulling out the remains of pickerel, and trout, and fried perch, calmly eating each and every scrap of food he found, right off the waxed paper or the used napkins they were wrapped in. He had stared at that boy for nearly half an hour—but only when the boy had turned toward him, running his tongue over a scrap of butcher's paper that held some last, red, raw trail of meat, did he realize that it was his own son, and that he was waiting for him.

And yet, even then he did not give up the drinking. It was not until that Fourth of July that he had first heard the name of his savior. He remembered it because the Polack kids had decided to celebrate the birth of the nation by bombarding the Black Bottom with bottle rockets, and Roman candles that came shrieking down amidst their yards, scattering the women and children, and making them scream. It had all been too hard on his nerves, and he had been inside, drinking beer with his father at the kitchen table, the sweat running freely down his face and back, in the little house. Too hungover from corn liquor to even sit up without the support of the table, thinking seriously of sticking his head out that back window when he heard the whistle of the next freight train blow.

“I been speakin' to Brother Abdul Muhammad—” his father had started to tell him.

“Who's that?”

“You know—the brother call himself Brown Eel when he was with the Moors—”

“Why's he call hisself—what?
Abdul Muhammad?”
“Well, this man give him a new name—”

“What man?”

“He calls hisself Far-rod, or Ford, or somethin'. Says he's here on a mission to the black man,” his father said guardedly; still reluctant to talk to his son about anything that touched too much upon theology.

“A mission? Like a missionary?”

“Best I heard it, he sayin' the black man is the Original People. He sayin' the white man is the devil.”

The moment he heard those words Elijah had felt his heart leap, and he had lifted up his head.

“I like to hear that man! That is good what Brown Eel said to you!” he exclaimed.

Yet so far had he sunk, so heavy was the weight that the white man had laid upon him, that even then he had not gone down to the Moorish Temple to hear this man speak. He had wanted him to come to his door, but he never did, and Elijah kept drinking, even though he knew that he would be ashamed if the man were to come and find him in such a state.

Then one day his wife had come home from the Moorish Temple and told him that she had met the man there, and that Elijah had to come and listen to him. But he was still too drunk, and his lungs were wheezing too badly that day even to let him stand up, and Clara had had to walk all the way back to the temple, just to invite Mr. Fard to come to dinner that night. Elijah had been sitting in his living room, still trying to catch his breath, when there was a single, light tap on his door. The bells of the far-off Polack church had just rung six o'clock when he heard the tapping—just that, a sound no greater than what a bird might have made—and he had gone to answer it.

To his astonishment, he saw there was a white man standing in his doorway.

“Invite me in, Elijah,” the white man said. “I am the one you've been waiting for.”

So great had been the aura about him, so strange and otherworldly that Elijah had simply stood back and opened the door wide. Welcoming him into his home, though he wasn't able to get a word out even to ask the man who he was.

“I know you think that I am white, but I'm not,” he told Elijah gently, as if he were reading his mind already. “What I am is an Asiatic black man. You've never seen anything like me. Have you?”

And it was true, he never had. He was a slight man, only a few inches taller than Elijah was himself, with waves of jet black hair oiled up high on his head. When he came into the light, Elijah could see that his skin didn't look quite like the hue of any colored man or any white man he had ever known. Instead, it was a sort of light olive color that seemed to change every time he looked at him. He had on an immaculate dark blue pinstriped suit, and a maroon fez that he wore with such dignity and poise that Elijah thought at once he must be some sort of ambassador.

“No, I'm not a diplomat. Unless by that you mean an ambassador from your true past.”

The man had smiled at him suddenly then, showing his rows of gleaming-white perfect teeth. But what had really captivated Elijah was his eyes. The pupils like two black moons, vast and unblinking—

“My name is the Honorable Wallace D. Fard, and I have come here to save my uncle, who has been lost in the wilderness of North America for the last four hundred years. And I have come to save you, as well, for you have been just as lost.”

“What do you mean?” Elijah asked him, even though he already had the uneasy feeling that he knew exactly what the strange man meant. But Master Fard merely sat down on Elijah's lumpy old living room couch, the one he had found on the street with the boy, and smiled back up at him from there.

“But you have seen it,” he said easily. “By now you have seen all that the white man's great civilization has to offer. You with all of your white man's dreams. Now you have seen all that they amount to. You once were lost, but now you are ready to be found.”

And when he heard those words, Elijah felt as if an electric shock had run down his spine. He stood rooted to the spot, transfixed in the gaze of those warm, luminous eyes until Master Fard had come over and taken him by the hand, and led him over to the couch.

They had sat there in Elijah's house, and talked until dawn, and the Master had given him his very first lesson in The Knowledge of Self and Others. He had taught him how time had begun with a spinning atom, seventy-six million years before, and how that atom had evolved into a Black Man, who was the Original Man. How he was that self-made Man who came to call Himself Allah, or God, and who created all things in the universe—and not some spook god, who dead souls flew up to on angel wings, like the white man believed in. He taught him how it was Allah who had molded the Original People in His image, and how for many millions of years they had lived on the single continent of Asia, in peace and contentment. There they had raised up the pyramids of Giza, and all the mountains of the Earth, and even caused the deportation of the Moon, through all their great knowledge of the sciences that remained unrivaled, even unto the present day.