Strivers Row (58 page)

“I got to get back to work now—” he began to tell Prof. Toussaint, but the man's grip on his elbow was like steel now, his other hand poking into Malcolm's side like a shiv, as he steered him over toward his store.

“That's fine! Glad to hear you're gainfully employed. Where you workin' now?” he asked deliberately, and Malcolm, wanting to change the subject, asked him a question of his own that he had not even realized was on his mind.

“Who's ‘X'?” he said.

“Pardon?” Prof. Toussaint said, although Malcolm could see his eyes were already shining merrily.

“Who's ‘X'? The front a that little green book you give me, it say,
The Biography of Elijah Muhammad
. By ‘X.' What's that?”

“Why, people who write books use ‘X' when they wanna be anonymous,” Prof. Toussaint told him, a grin licking up at the sides of his mouth. Malcolm thought at that moment how much he seemed like the little brown man of his dreams, and he wondered wildly if Prof. Toussaint could have written the book himself.

“But then, ‘X' could be every Black Man in America,” he went on. “We're
all
anonymous. We all been stripped of our real names, our real history. It could be any one of us, just waitin' for you to read it, an' give him a real name.”

“
Me?
” Malcolm asked, confused.

“Sure. You the one readin' it, ain't you?” Prof. Toussaint chuckled. “That ‘X' could stand for anything
you
make it. That ‘X' stands for everything you been, an' everything you can become. Ex-drinker. Ex-doper. Ex-gambler, ex-hustler. Ex-slave.”

“I dunno. It says in those books the white man was invented by a crazy, big-head scientist. Along with all the Chinese, an' the Indians—”

“So? You believe all those things in the white man's Bible?” Prof. Toussaint asked him. “You believe a man rose from the dead after three days? Or parted the sea, or wrestled with a angel? Or got swallowed up by a whale, but then was spit up on the land, an' come out fine as thine?”

Malcolm couldn't think of anything to say, and the Professor gave a deep, dry chuckle.

“You go down to Coney Island an' try that sometime, provided you can find the whale.”

“But—”

“It's a story, son. The Bible's all made up of stories—metaphors, and parables. You think people really started out with Adam an' Eve in the Garden of Eden?”

“No—”

“No! First man started out in Africa—even those big-head, white scientists believe that now. So what's that make the Original Man?”

“A black man?”

“Now you got it! And if the Original Man is a Black Man, then what did everybody else come from? Who
made
them—all of those white folks, and Chinese, and Indians?”

“The black man.”

“There you are. You can dress it up in any story you want, it don't change the truth. White man wants you to believe he's a superior being—that nothing gets done on this earth without him, and everybody else is a savage. But that ain't the truth. Black men were building the pyramids of Egypt, and the great city of Zimbabwe, back when white men in Europe were living in caves, an' wearing animal skins.”

“But why doesn't anybody else know this?” Malcolm asked him sincerely, and Prof. Toussaint leaned in, and tapped him paternally on the back.

“What do you think the truth
is
, son?” he asked, his voice quiet and confidential. “You think it just sits out in the sun like a rock, waitin' for any fool to pick it up? The truth is like a vein of gold, hidden in a mountainside. You got to dig for it. The truth is like an old hare, hidin' in the bushes. Sometimes you got to flush it out, and run it down.”

“I gotta go,” Malcolm said, noticing that the crowd was beginning to break up, the police looking around. But to his surprise, Prof. Toussaint let go of him easily now.

“Go on, then,” he told Malcolm, as cheerily as ever. “Man can run from the truth for a long time. That don't mean it ain't still the truth!”

But by then, Malcolm was already yards away from him, moving rapidly down 125th Street. He was so intent on being away that it was only when he was about to walk down into the A train that he noticed the bulge in his jacket pocket, right below where Prof. Toussaint had poked him so hard in the ribs. He reached down, felt a familiar smooth, rectangular object there, and realized to his amazement that the little bookstore owner had planted something on him. He pulled it out at once—knowing all the same, as he did, just what it would be: another copy of that strange book. Right down to the green patent-leather cover, and the gold crescent moon—the same mysterious words on the title page:
THE BIOGRAPHY OF ELIJAH MUHAMMAD.
By “X.” The very same edition of the same book—only this one was marked, with a long, black sliver of paper at the start of a chapter about halfway through the manuscript.

Malcolm put off opening it until he got all the way up to the bus station. He stood out on the platform there, watching the constant hum and buzz of traffic through the gaping mouths of the bridge arches; the ships in the wide, lazy summer river. Letting two, three buses go by, allowing the steady flow of the traffic to lull him into a near-sleep. Pacing back and forth on the bus platform, the book burning a hole in his jacket pocket, wondering if he should crack it open here or not.

It seemed to him a sacrilege, somehow, to open it up in such a public place, when it should be taken home, read by him in the intimacy of his room. Already, he could imagine all the things that could go wrong if he took it out—picturing a sudden gust of wind pulling it out the open bus window, dropping it down a sewer drain. But he could not help thinking about the bookmark, wondering if it was there just by chance, or to point out some specific passage Prof. Toussaint wanted him to read. Wondering, until he could stand it no longer, just what that might be.

He ran back down the narrow staircase from the platform, holding the book in his hand—still in his jacket pocket—as he did so. He went down the main terminal level, then down another flight, where the long-distance buses left from. He went into the men's room there, forcing himself not to look around, not to look too conspicuous—trying at the same time to scope out which of the flabby, down-at-the-heels men circling around the shoeshine stand at the entrance might be a vice-squad man.

He continued on inside, and went into a stall, sitting on top of a toilet seat there but not undoing his pants—not wanting to get caught unprepared by anyone. Then, when he was sure that the stall door was latched, and he could no longer see the brogans of any more men shifting around on the sea green floor tiles outside, he pulled out a pack of Sammy's marijuana sticks—the one he had retrieved once the crowd had rescued him from the cops. He smoked his way through one stick, then another, then two more after that, trying to pull himself together. Only then was he finally calm enough to open the book, and begin to read.

Elijah had known the little Chinaman meant trouble from the moment he first laid eyes on him, slipping into a side door of the Allah Temple near the end of services. The Fruit of Islam were supposed to be guarding all the doors, but a fight had broken out among the faithful, and when they moved off to stop it he had slipped right in, as if he had been waiting for that very moment. Even worse, he had gone right up to the Master at the end of the service, greeting him like an old friend—pumping his hand and slapping his back, something Elijah had never seen Master Fard do with anyone before, black or white.

Elijah had slipped out after the Chinaman when he left, afraid he was a police informer, or maybe some kind of devil. But the man had stopped in the alley beside the temple and faced Elijah head-on, as if he had been expecting him, a hand slipping into his side pocket.

“You must be George's new partner,” he said, a smile slowly pulling up his mouth. He had big ears that stood out from his head, a sharp, hawklike nose, and the hardest eyes and mouth Elijah had ever seen on a man.

“Why you call him George? It's
Master Fard
—” Elijah started to say, indignant, but the Chinaman only cut him off with a harsh little laugh.

“Whatever you say, chief. He always did like to give out the names. Mine's Donaldson. Eddie Donaldson. Maybe he mentioned me.”

“I don't believe he did, sir,” Elijah said formally. “And
Master Fard
is the Mahdi—the revealed incarnation of God—”

“He always loved his religion,” the man said, and spat in the alleyway. “All that Azusa Street shit. But I gotta hand it to him, it's a better play than morphine. Less trouble from the bulls.”

“What do you mean by that?” Elijah had exploded, moving toward the man before he quite knew what he was doing. “You take back your blasphemy!”

But Donaldson had sidestepped him as adroitly as a boxer, moving up the alley, away from him—still grinning his sardonic, unnatural grin.

“Don't worry, I won't get in your way! Just tell him to remember: You can't trust a Jap. Remind him how much trouble he got into in 'Frisco—and Seattle!” he called back to Elijah—words that filled him with a deep uneasiness.

When Master Fard had first raised him up over all the others and made him Supreme Minister, everything had been perfect. The Master had been at Elijah's humble little house night and day, for nine months, instructing him in all there was to know about The Knowledge of Self and Others. Talking on and on, well past midnight, until Elijah's head flopped down on his chest, and he wished that sometimes the Master did not favor him quite so much.

But sometimes, too, Master Fard had Elijah over to the suite of rooms he kept in the Fraymore Hotel, where he let him listen in on his special receiver, to the radio communications he claimed that he received from the people on Mars. Elijah had to admit that he had doubted even the Master's ability to do this at first, but the words he heard coming through the radio were in a language that he had never heard anything remotely like before—high and whispery, almost like a song. The radio, too, was unlike anything he had ever seen, with odd silver dials and levers, and strange markings on it that he could not decipher.

After Master Fard had let him listen and wonder over their communications, he would take him out driving in his red Chevy coupe. They would drive all the way up through the Polack neighborhoods in Hamtramck. Elijah was apprehensive about their being spotted there, two black men in a flashy red car, but he saw that Fard remained as serene about it as ever. Driving on through Hamtramck, and up a low ridge where they could look down on the industrial morass below them. The stunted houses, and the shuttered plants, hunkered below like a man bracing to take a blow. The only lights the flickering red campfires and ash-can fires from over in the hobo jungles—the greater fires from the forges and the smokestacks all banked now.

“You can see it, can't you?” Fard asked him in his soft voice, as mildly as if he were talking about the weather. “The day of the white man is coming to an end. His factories are shutting down. His great cities are falling apart. Out in the country, his farms are drying up and blowing away. All his tricks won't save him now.”

“Yes,” Elijah answered, and in that moment, watching the darkened city, he really believed it to be true, and that Master Fard was the greatest prophet of all.

Soon afterward, though, the Master had begun to hold other meetings, at night in his rooms, with all the curtains drawn—meetings that were open only to the innermost circle of the Fruit of Islam. These meetings were always fraught with tension for Elijah, for he knew that Master Fard had angered the others when he had raised up Elijah over them, especially Othman Ali, and Abdul Muhammad, the brother who used to call himself Brown Eel, and who had been with Fard the longest. He could see from the looks they shot him, whenever they thought he wasn't looking, that they would just as soon see him dead, and he never left or went to their meetings by the same way, and carried himself as warily as he had around the white men back in Georgia.

It was at these gatherings that Master Fard instructed them in secret things—things that he had never mentioned down at the temple on Hancock Avenue. It was here that he had first told them about the Mother Plane, which was misnamed Ezekiel's Wheel in the white man's Poison Book Bible. He told them how he had built the Mother Plane himself, in Japan, and how it was one-half mile by one-half mile in size, and how its belly was filled with fifteen hundred baby planes. Each one of these was piloted by a Black scientist who had been trained from the age of six for his mission, and who had never laughed, and never cried, and had never known a woman.

On the Day of Destruction, at his command, the Mother Plane would let go of her burden. The baby planes would drop their bombs from twelve miles above the Earth, and they would turn all of white America into a great lake of fire that would burn and not stop burning for the next three hundred and ninety years. Only the Original People would be spared. They would emerge from where they had been hiding, and purified, and given their inheritance. And then Allah would finally explain to them why He had ever allowed white people to be created in the first place.

By the time Master Fard had finished, Elijah's eyes were closed. He wanted to concentrate only on the beautiful words, without seeing anything that might disturb them. Not the dumbfounded faces of the other Fruit of Islam around him—not even the image of Fard himself.

Of course that was how it had to be. The reason for why God had left the black people to suffer so long in this land. There was a reason for it after all.

They had remained silent, and then Master Fard had stood up and walked into the other room. When he returned, he was accompanied by an elderly, round, Japanese gentleman. There was no mistaking him. He was wearing Coke-bottle glasses, a dark suit, and a bowler hat, and the rest of them could have been no less surprised if he had come back in with an actual demon.