The Writer and the World (27 page)

It is a “difficult task for three people of as diverse Racial Charisterics as ourselves to truly communicate.” But they are good friends, and agree to talk of their “most secret desires.” Harold the Anglo-Saxon wants to search for truth. “Jacks not as simple as that”: Jack the Jew wants to “make things for people, the people he’s closest to are naturally his own people, Jews he will make whatever they need, money, Clothes, Factories.” And Malik, the Negro, sees “the great divides that exist between us of different Races for my own search is one of happiness to create Joys for myself and others to hear Laughter, to give … But what a strange dilima this throws us into when I give to him the seeker after truth my
humble present and he in his search looks into my little gesture for a deeper motivation or Jack when he makes a garment, and I say how lovely, could I have one and he tells me
x
Pounds.”

Malik’s ghosted autobiography was a publishing failure; one of his white patrons bought up most of the copies. The tone of the book is determinedly gay; there are lots of sex and parties—the ghost, easily turning oppressed blacks into abandoned spooks, seems in places to have excited himself with thoughts of a Michael X musical. But it is not an easy book to read.

It is not the story of a life or the development of a personality. The narrator, from his London eminence as the X, the reformed Negro ponce who is now the Negro leader, assumes that the events of his life are well known; and he is concerned only to present himself in all his Negro roles. Events accumulate confusedly around him; he is without a personality; he is only a haphazard succession of roles. At the time of his meeting with an unidentified young property millionaire, who is interested in art—the narrator appears, without warning, as a painter (“my abstracts and surrealist portraits”); and he supports this role for exactly seventeen lines. Equally sudden, equally successful, and almost as brief, are his manifestations as Negro poet, writer, and even as a teacher of “basic English” at something called the London Free School.

The only other considerable figure in the autobiography is Malik’s mother; and she is as puzzling as Malik. She appears first of all as a ferocious old-fashioned black woman, concerned about appearances and forever preaching the beauty of whiteness. She doesn’t like her son to play with black children or to get his hands dirty; she is snobbish; when she goes to the Port of Spain market she refuses to speak French patois to the
marchandes
and insists that her son speak English; she sends her son to an “exclusive” school. This is overstated, but it has a certain logic. But then, just twenty pages later, the mother is suddenly a drunkard, hysterical, quarrelsome, wearing appalling Negro-woman’s clothes. One day her son finds her sleeping in the fowl coop, which she says she has converted. Suddenly she is a “hustler”; suddenly, coming to London, she is transformed into a successful and jolly brothelkeeper.

The childhood of the leader, the rebel who learned to love black, no longer makes sense; the emphasis is wrong. Certain facts about his mother are too important to the narrator for him to leave out. But the
facts have been scattered about the picaresque narrative: a pain greater than the one stated is being concealed. When the facts are put together, the childhood of the leader can be interpreted in quite another way.

Malik’s father was a Portuguese shopkeeper who later left Trinidad to do business on the island of St. Kitts. His mother was an uneducated black woman from Barbados. In Trinidad, and especially in the tight lower-middle-class Negro community of Belmont in Port of Spain, she was a stranger, with different manners and a different accent. If she didn’t speak the local French patois it was because she didn’t know it. She was a stranger with a “red bastard,” and she was never allowed to forget it by the black taxi driver with whom she lived. (He used to tell her that all she had got from the Portuguese man was a big cunt and a red bastard. This is not in the autobiography; it was part of Malik’s statement at his trial.)

The mother was disgraced by the son; the son, growing up in Port of Spain, going to St. Mary’s College (a major school, but not so “exclusive”: the fees were just over three pounds a term), his home life known to all, was disgraced by the mother. She was uneducated, drunken, vicious; they tormented one another. He fled from her whenever he could, going off into the hills with his friends. Once he got all her clothes together and burned them. But she pursued him everywhere with her public scenes, even after he had been expelled from the college, even after he had grown up. He could escape only by leaving Trinidad, by becoming a seaman; at one time he thought of going to live in Guyana. In the end he went to England; but she followed him even there, getting off the boat train at Waterloo in a red bathrobe.

In 1965, when his London fame was beginning, and when in his own eyes he had made good, Malik began a letter to his mother.

She had got into bed with the man, and when he was asleep she had got out; she had heated the water beforehand. The incident doesn’t appear in the autobiography. Everything else does; but in the padded-out, picaresque narrative, the passion and the pain vanish, simplified, and vitally altered, to give a smoother account of the boyhood of the leader.

This letter is the truest thing Malik ever wrote, and the most moving. It explains so much: the change of name from de Freitas to X, the assumption of so many personalities, the anxiety to please. A real torment was buried in the clowning of the racial entertainer. Black Power gave order and logic to the life; it provided Malik with a complete system. He couldn’t write a book; but it was better for him to say, as he does in the preliminary note to his autobiography, that the book was ghosted because black English is different from white English.

A L
ONDON
journalist who had some hand in the making of Malik says, “Michael took the press for a ride, and vice versa. And out of it grew a monster.” The monster already existed; but there is something in the judgement. Malik was made in England. England gave him friends, a knowledge of elegance, a newspaper fame which was like regard, and money. England always gave him money; no one, for so many good black causes, needed money so badly. It occurred to him, for instance, late in 1966, when his wife was in arrears with her mortgage payments and receiving solicitor’s letters, that West Indians needed adequate representation in the courts. He interested people in this cause. The London
Oz
of February 1967 announced the West Indian legal need, and in heavy letters at the top of the page prescribed the remedy: “‘Defence’ needs money. Send to Michael Abdul Malik, Leith Mansions, Grantully Road, W
₉
.”

England made many things easy for Malik. But England in the end undid him. Malik exaggerated the importance of his newspaper fame. He exaggerated the importance of the fringe groups which seemed to have made room for him. He was an entertainer, a play-actor; but he wasn’t the only one. He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with “revolution” as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel. Malik thought he shared the security of his supporters. One day, half doodling (“No Money”), half jotting down memoranda (“Letter from Lawyer”), he wrote: “My inheritance is London—all of it.”

His fame didn’t last long. It began in 1965, and came to an end in 1967, when he went to jail for an offence under the 1965 Race Relations Act. It was in July 1965 that Colin McGlashan, in a major article in the
Observer
, told of the existence in England of a militant black organization, the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), with a membership of more than forty-five thousand, that had been created “in near-secrecy” by Michael de Freitas. “Some immigrants,” McGlashan reported, “already talk of Michael X.” It was a good story: “… revolutionary fervour … near-national organization … formidable professionalism … underground technique … system of cells … financed from donations and Mr. de Freitas’s own money … organizers, in the best revolutionary tradition, accept a pittance … a shy, gentle and highly intelligent man … the authentic voice of black bitterness … Says a friend: ‘It is a crime against humanity that people like Michael happen …’”

It was a good story, and if it was a string of newspaper clichés it was only because what was being presented to McGlashan, as a good story, was a string of newspaper clichés. From his autobiography, published three years later, it seems that at the time of the McGlashan article Malik was perhaps more concerned with a beautiful white widow, whom he calls Carmen. Carmen was thirty, “with a lovely, supple body,” and rich. Once she opened her handbag and gave Malik “a bundle of £10 notes”;
another time she wrote him a cheque for £500. He took all that she gave—“I have no doubt that the ponce element produced in the black man by the ghetto was with me that night”—but it was all for the cause, the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Still, he suffered: “My speeches became more and more bitter.” And there was Nancy, another white woman, who was his steady. Carmen had to go. “With the departure of Carmen, RAAS had no more income.” And in four pages, which also cover the story of Carmen, the membership of RAAS drops from sixty-five thousand “on paper” to two thousand “hard core.”

Malik loved his publicity. He cut out and filed every reference to himself in the British press, however slight, however critical (the
Daily Telegraph
must have been his favourite paper). He filed two copies of McGlashan’s article; and when he brought out his RAAS brochure—which was really a brochure about Michael X, complete with press notices (no other name was mentioned)—he used two separate quotes from McGlashan, together with quotes from the
Daily Mirror
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Sunday Times, Peace News
, and the
New York Times
(“Students, intellectuals, moderates and radicals are all being wooed. Some have already been won over”).

RAAS was of course a joke. The initials spell out an obscenity which is Jamaican (and not Trinidadian) and is nothing more than a corruption of “arse.” A crude joke, and in the autobiography it is grotesquely extended. “In the first place RAAS is a West Indian word for a menstrual blood cloth. It has some symbolic significance in view of the way the black man has been drained of his life blood for so long. In the second place there is the similar African word
ras
(from the Arabic
ra’s
—head) meaning Ruler or Leader.” A “satirical” joke; but it could only have been made by a man who felt that he could, when the time came, withdraw from his Negro role.

Malik’s Negro was, in fact, a grotesque: not American, not West Indian, but an American caricatured by a red man from Trinidad for a British audience. West Indians are not black Americans. American blacks are an excluded minority. West Indians come from countries with black majorities and black administrations; they have a kind of political tradition. Boscoe Holder, a black Trinidad dancer who was in London at the time, says, “When I heard about this X guy I thought, ‘There goes one of our con men.’ And I wished him well, because he was in England and because they told me he was Trinidadian.” It was the West Indian attitude:
the jester was recognized and accepted as a jester, but was otherwise kept at a distance. Occasionally Malik’s publicity excited a student or a writer or a politician. In 1965, after the McGlashan article, the leader of the Trinidad opposition—mainly an Indian party—thought of asking Malik down to Trinidad to help with the elections.

But Malik never held these people. And in London he didn’t really need them. A West Indian Malik had recently met—and who was eventually to act as his political deputy—was a young Trinidadian called Stanley Abbott, like Malik a college boy who had dropped out, and like Malik a red man with Spanish or Portuguese antecedents (Abbott sometimes called himself De Piva). Abbott had come to England at the age of nineteen in 1956, and was very quickly adrift in London, a lost soul adding and adding to a police record: wilful damage in 1956, breaking and entering in 1958, Borstal and supervision between 1958 and 1962, assault in 1964.

And already the West Indian closest to Malik was Steve Yeates, black but in other respects a man like Malik himself, a dropout from Malik’s own Belmont district in Port of Spain: Steve Yeates, soon to be given the Black Muslim name of Muhammed Akbar, who had been expelled from St. Mary’s College, Malik’s old school, for getting a fourteen-year-old girl from a Carmelite reform school pregnant; Steve Yeates who, later, at the age of sixteen, while he was a student at another college, had been charged with nine others for the gang-rape of a girl in the Girl Guides hut in Belmont; who, acquitted but disgraced, had been sent by his family to England, where he had joined the RAF, but had then got into trouble of some sort and gone absent without leave; who had been badly wounded in the back during a fight and carried the scar.