Quite by accident, on Saturday while he was waiting for Maida to finish her show, he discovered that a new group had come to Harlem. Max had a drink while waiting for Maida’s show to go on. He always left her in the booth taking a final swallow of her gin and tonic, wetting her lips and glancing at the clock. He stepped into the street and strode the few steps to the corner, Harlem Square, Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. He glanced southward, toward the Theresa Hotel, and stopped dead still. The orator there looked familiar. He was a little man, very dark and old, and he wore, Max could see, a beret, a zoot suit, both faded. Professor Bazzam? Max crossed the street and stood at the rear of the crowd. Sure, it was the Professor, wasn’t it? But he couldn’t hold the people. They kept coming up and slipping away; Max slipped away with them. Back on the side of the street he had left, another orator, a dirty little American flag drooped listlessy over his box, delivered an illiterate diatribe against Jews, white men in general, and other Negroes; he spoke with a West Indian accent. “A Geechee,” someone in the crowd said.
Across the street, in front of Micheaux’s bookshop, another group caught Max’s attention. The men wore neat dark suits; their hair, to a man, was neatly barbered and their shoes were shined. The man who was speaking to them looked vaguely familiar to Max that first day, but everyone called him Minister Q of the Black Muslims. It was in a way laughable at first; each orator tried to outdo the others with gimmicks—African robes, berets, tuxedos. The people said that Minister Q’s bag was “super cool.”
But with each successive Saturday, Minister Q was drawing the people away from the other orators who, cursing, would snatch the flags off their boxes and stuff them in their pockets and join the crowds swarming across the street to hear him. More and more people were doing more listening than laughing. One Saturday when Maida had finished her show and was standing beside Max, she said, “I want him on my show. That man is talking a whole lot of sense.”
Minister Q was an untainted, a pure African Negro such as is seldom seen in the United States today. Nothing Indian or white seemed ever to have touched his genes. He was all muscle and three yards wide; when he goes, Max thought, they’ll have to make a special coffin for him. The Minister was quick on his feet. Later he confided to Max and Maida: “When I was younger I could Lindy all night, wear out four or five partners. I could do everything all night—and did it. Then I’ve been a bouncer and I worked as a molder in a foundry, you know, going all day like a slave, each mold weighing seventy-five pounds, and shaking out too. I thought I was pretty great because I could turn out more molds per day than any other man in the place. Those white devils just had a good thing and knew it.”
Minister Q was talking in his neat little office in the mosque. Maida was taking notes; Max was remembering, and now he remembered who Minister Q had been. “In the old days, before I found Allah, I was also a boxer.”
Of course, Max thought. Kid Go-Go, a middleweight, a forerunner of Sugar Ray. Even then—what had he been, about sixteen or seventeen? Even then he had the build of a heavyweight from the torso up. He’d never got a chance at the title. The last ten seconds of each round, the Kid had gone after his man without letup, hooking, jabbing, crossing, loosing a series of blinding fast combinations. Now the Kid—Minister Q—had a bottom lip that splayed out while the upper one protested swollenly. “I hadn’t found Allah then,” the Minister went on, “but I had sense enough to know that I was being exploited. I fought the best of them, Graziano, La-Motta, and never got anywhere near the crown. I got out. Women, whiskey, horses, numbers, just wasting my life and didn’t know it. I found Allah when I was in state prison for pushing junk. I don’t try to hide it. I know what my life was and I know what it is now. And I know the whys and wherefores.”
Minister Q could have been the same age as Durrell, but he didn’t look it. Now the Minister looked at them from across his little desk. “And you both work for them, the white devils.” He placed his broad, blunt fingers together. “May Allah be with you. May Allah watch over you.”
Where Durrell employed fanciful imagery and rhetoric, Minister Q preached the history, economics and religion of race relations; he preached a message so harsh that it hurt to listen to it. Max saw the shamed faces of the men in the crowd Saturday after Saturday. The Minister would raise his heavily muscled arms that had driven opponents from one corner to another and bring them down on the rostrum like twin judo chops. The crowd would flinch.
The Saturday Minister Q first came to prominence, Max and Maida were in his street corner audience.
The Minister said: “Those white devils took away our history. They hid the records and lied to us. We have a history, but no white man is going to reveal it. We have to dig it out ourselves and the work is not hard, brothers. That work is sweet! Sweet to learn of old and mighty empires, of kings and princes of such influence that it reached into Europe where the white man slumbered in his Dark Ages. Yes! That’s the way it was! When he woke from slumber he grabbed Africa, ripped us from her and with his profits—from slave profits—he began his industrialization. Europe was already in slavery, they didn’t need Africans. A serf was a slave! A serf, I tell you, was a slave! So we came here. They raped our women and over the generations bent the minds of our children so that only now, today! are they beginning to grasp the truth about the white devils of this society of his called America. Don’t tell me about those white devils! There are no good white men! None!”
Max could feel a shiver run through the crowd. “Tell ’em, Minister! Tell ’em!”
“How many of you here,” Minister Q went on, “own one single brick in the whole of Harlem? How many? Not a single hand, not a finger, and do you know, brothers, that is exactly why you’re here this afternoon! And here are all the so-called Negroes in America getting excited about dee-segreeegation. Why, in Allah’s name, why?” The Minister flung his arms outward in mighty protest. “We don’t want to be with them! We want our own land. They owe it to us. They’ve bled you [powerful blunt finger pointing at the crowd], your fathers, your grandfathers, your great-grandfathers, your great-great-grandfathers, to death! Don’t you know that this country is based on the labors of the black man? They took the strength and wisdom that was ours and ground it under cotton patches, forced it to open its legs under magnolia trees. Allah endowed us with wisdom, strength and goodness. They tried to blot out our wisdom and the work made our strength ten times what it was. Listen: little Negro babies—” Here the Minister paused. “Little Negro babies walk sooner than little white babies. What does that mean? Strength. Now, brothers, the time for goodness is past. Allah knows the time for goodness is past. Look at the mark of the white man around you: those cops with those cannons on their hips; look at your skins, brown, yellow, white, tan—where did all the black go? You know: it went in the bedrooms, on the slave ships, in the fields, in the big houses—” Minister Q paused again: no sweat ever came to his face; he might have been created around a cake of black ice. “Now look at you. Tainted, owning nothing, cowed, pride in nothing, dignity in hitting the numbers or in drinking two fifths of the white devils’ liquor.” The Minister set himself. “The time for that is past. Brothers, watch your women! Take your children in hand so they might have the dignity you’ve lost. Above all, watch the white devil. Too long has he marched back and forth across this land stealing, raping and murdering. I call now for black manhood. Dignity. Pride. Don’t turn the other cheek any more. Defend yourselves, strike back and when you do, strike to hurt, strike to maim, strike to—”
The crowd leaned toward him waiting for the word. But Minister Q smiled; he would not say it. He did not have to say it. His meaning was clear. “Allah,” he said, “calls upon you to defend what is yours—yourself, your family, your dignity.” Long moments after he had climbed down from the platform, the crowd stood motionless, then it broke into cheers.
That night on television Max heard the commentators:
“The leader of an anti-white group, who calls hims
elf Minister Q, today advocated the killing of white men …”
“Race hatred today reared its ugly head in Harlem …”
Max laughed. How self-righteous they had become all of a sudden. White people didn’t want to be hated; it was all right for them to hate, but to be hated in return, virulently hated—it stunned them.
America had bred this time, Max mused, this time and people like Durrell and Minister Q. America bred them as surely as it bred sweet corn and grapefruit. Durrell’s people came from the church-going middle class; Minister Q’s from the muddiest backwashes of Negro life. The white man was going to have some choice to make between them, but he would, Max knew, choose to deal with the remembered image, and that would be Durrell.
With the fall, Max went South again, this time to a university town. For the first time in his life he saw a white mob howling and bleating, snarling and tearing. It’s object was a lone, skinny, unattractive Negro girl who had been admitted as a freshman. During the war Max thought if he got out of it alive, he would never again know fear. Anger he had known.
He knew a new anger and a new fear as he listened to the coed tell her parents and uncles and cousins about the first day. Even now in the cities across the land the newspapers would be carrying pictures and the wire service stories. There were still strings and gobs of spit in the coed’s hair that she hadn’t managed to clean out. Max thought: They demand so much, the white people, from each and every one of us. These were the people so many white writers were proud of. Where were those lone, sensitive, heroic white Southern men, a little apart from the rest, a little unbalanced, gentle with animals and women, descendants of Civil War heroes and pioneers who had wrested giant homesteads from the earth? Where were they? And what were their offspring learning in their schools and colleges fretted with magnolias, azaleas and cypresses?
The older people, clucking and frowning, the women crying softly, fed the shocked coed, washed her hair and put her to bed. Among the men no word was spoken, but suddenly, lifted heavily from each car in the driveway, came a rifle or shotgun, boxes of ammunition. Standing at a window, Max could see them loading their guns, smoking, exchanging brief words with each other and glancing slowly up and down the nearby road. A pair of mockingbirds swooped across the yard as dusk came slowly and Max, still at the window, thought once again of Southern writers. The good ones, the truthful ones, were always the women. The women the Southern gentlemen had always protected. Perhaps it was the women of both races who would have to clean up the mess. Another car pulled into the driveway, the men paying it no attention because they knew the sound of its motor, knew its color a half-mile off on a straight stretch of road. The newcomer also had a rifle over which, coming out of the car, bounded an alert mongrel bird dog. Max watched in silent admiration. The men split up and soon vanished into the lengthening shadows, their guns held gently in the crooks of their arms. Somehow, there was no doubt that the girl would go back the next day; it was as if each relative knew that fact for himself and extended it to everyone containing his blood. Max sat in the living room. No white reporter could have been able to do this; he was not going to miss any of it. The relatives tiptoed through the house, those who stayed up. Once in a while Max joined the guards in the kitchen for coffee.
Was this what so many places in America were going to be like until the law, justice, took off her goddamn blindfold and saw what she had been doing with it on? Dawn came. The women rustled in the kitchen and soon the house was filled with the smell of fried ham and eggs, the pale odor of cooking grits. The girl’s father had taken one of the early watches. Now he came downstairs, rested, but his eyes were red. He was a man for whom the pace of life, especially this aspect of it, was all too sudden. He didn’t really understand it, but with a child in the house caught up in this time, he could not, in some way, not understand it; where it failed to come through in all its intellectual complexities, it succeeded emotionally. They had hooted and beat at his daughter, spit at her. But it was important that she go back; there were others who would follow her. They were evil, those white people in the mob, and had to be smitten. An eye for an eye. Jesus Christ, Lord Almighty, where are you this morning?
The girl herself put spark into the morning and thus gained beauty. She had them laughing (politely) at breakfast, after which she preceded her father to the car. The rest would have to wait; that white beast out there sought any excuse to kill: a rifle in a car, a caravan of Negroes protecting their own. The car pulled out of the driveway slowly, as if the girl’s father, to incite a gentle day, had merely caressed the accelerator. The exhaust pipe puffed small blue wisps of smoke. Then the car was gone. At the main road, grinning cops in cars would follow it, providing not the protection they had been slovenly enjoined to, but an invitation to the mob to do almost exactly as it wished when they (the cops) sped off on a side road.
As soon as the coed and her father had left, Max got a ride to his rooming house where he was to meet the Atlanta bureau man. They were cordial to each other. Max got in the front seat—a photographer was in the back—and a taut silence filled the car. The mob was bigger now, joined by the rednecks from the countryside. Factory workers from the other side of town, afraid that the college boys wouldn’t properly run that nigger bitch off the campus, had swollen the ranks of the mob. Max guessed that today was the first time many of them had ever set foot on a college campus.
The Atlanta man was nervous. Max knew why; he would draw the attention of the mob. The Atlanta man knew, as Max knew, that failing to find the girl who was being spirited from class to class by the campus police, the mob would turn on just any Negro. Max was remembering stories of white men on the hunt for a suspected Negro rapist, murderer or plain bad nigger. The Negroes shut themselves up in their homes and talked in low voices as if waiting for a capricious hurricane from the Caribbean to pass through. They knew, those old Negroes, of the waverings and curvings of white men gathered in mobs; it was something that went down in the blood, the smell of gasoline burning along with flesh, the grisly souvenir hunters. Yes. If they couldn’t find who was supposed to be the culprit, just any nigger would do. Once they got up a head of steam, cooking underneath with still likker, the history of their time and place steaming like hog guts thrown upon cold stones with the first frost, nothing could stop them until they got their blood.
Moments later, at the photographer’s request, the Atlanta bureau man stopped. The photographer hopped out and took pictures of the flank of the mob, which, suddenly seeing first him and then Max, wheeled and began to pour toward the car. Max remembered chino-covered legs, blurs of white sneakers mixed with heavy country shoes, the uneven drumming of running feet on the grass, the curses. The photographer scrambled back into the car muttering something about a telephoto lens the next time. The Atlanta bureau man sat paralyzed at the wheel. He snapped out of it long enough to scream through a slightly opened window, “Press! Press! Back off there you kids!” A book glanced off his window and he raised it. He looked as if he were going to cry. Max heard the photographer snapping and cranking. The people in the mob had grabbed the car bumpers and were rocking the car. Max wished he had a knife, a gun, a rock. Something. Rocks and more books crashed against Max’s window. Looking through the window, he picked out the man he wanted to have if they broke into the car. He would break that motherfucker’s neck if he had only a second to do it in; no mob would stop him. That thought made him feel better. “Start this damned thing!” Max shouted at the frozen Atlanta bureau man; the photographer reached over and slapped the man sharply. The Atlanta man’s glazed eyes now snapped with fear. Max pressed his left foot against the accelerator; the car jumped forward and the people flew away from it. Max jammed it down and outside he saw the expressions on the faces had changed quite suddenly to fear. A sudden warmth flooded through Max. As the car moved and jerked, the Atlanta bureau man sighed and gripped the wheel more firmly. Within seconds they’d left the mob behind. Shaking, Max lit a cigarette. “This is your
goddamn Southern hospitality, huh?”
The Atlanta bureau man drove silently, first ashamed that his fear had been so obvious. Then he wondered what in the hell they were thinking about in New York? This wasn’t any place for a nigger reporter, he didn’t give a damn if it was Pace, not when the people in the mobs were throwing things at white men, too, and calling them nigger lovers! Why, the Atlanta bureau man thought in surprise, he had never been as close to a nigger in all his life as he was right now. But those people out there, you couldn’t expect them to believe that.
It took only a week before the university found an excuse to expel the Negro coed from the campus.
Sometime later, back in New York, Max learned that Paul Durrell’s group had won its demands, two years in the asking. Schools would open the following year on a desegregated basis; the department stores were thrown wide open and no Negro had to take a back seat to any white person on any streetcar in Altea. But within a week of Durrell’s victory, his lieutenants complained that the Group’s funds had been grossly tampered with. Durrell, finally clearing himself of any implication of grand larceny, went to Chicago.
It seemed to Max that the white press had created the atmosphere for the minister’s acquittal; that was the way the white boys worked. Were the stakes in the present so high that the white power structure was prepared to save Durrell from his mistakes already? He’d indebted himself to white America if he really was guilty. One day the leadermakers would call in the chips. Max hoped Durrell was really, really clean. The movement couldn’t be affected then, it would keep on rolling. If it worked the other way, disaster. The steam going out of everything; old sisters and brothers, close to the grave, crushed; young sisters and brothers drifting toward Minister Q and, generally, hard-assed times coming.
The Man Who Cried I Am Page 28