Eureka Man: A Novel

by Patrick Middleton

  Many thought Champ's first real challenge would come after he fired the five concession stand workers from Pittsburgh, who had been on the job for as long as the organization had been in existence and skimming graft for just as long. Complaints among these men flared like snake cowls: Whatever happened to respect? We've been here a lot longer than those Philly guys. Who in the hell do they think they are, anyway? This is some geographical bullshit! But when it came time to hand over the keys and records they were as cordial as church ushers.

  Six months after Champ installed his own people to run the year-round soda and popcorn concession stands the organization began churning out record profits, and morale among its members actively engaged in making a contribution to one committee or another was at an all-time high. Champ's ingenuity had brought a measure of pride and stature to the organization that had never before existed. The Pennsylvania Lifers Association was functioning like a big city Chamber of Commerce.

  For the next nine years, while the organization and its members thrived, life in the free world experienced an explosion of violence and crime in every major city across America. As the usual swarm of talking heads sounded off about the best way to handle the problem, op-ed editors found themselves in a buyer's market. While one side of the page demanded more prisons, longer sentences and harder time, the other side pointed out the obvious root causes to the problem: poverty; truancy; media violence; poor nutrition; the erosion of family values; godlessness; the absence of moral training in schools; insufficient funding for social programs; and the unrelenting infestation of drugs in the inner cities. By 1989, a steady rise in Riverview's population, along with the accompanying daily violence, underlined the growing discontent within the penitentiary walls. A reduction in food portions and other amenities added to this undercurrent of tension, which only reinforced and heightened the rumors that the worst was yet to come. Consequently, every anarchist, misanthrope and conscientious objector among Riverview's four hundred and three lifers were urging their peers to store up knives, razor blades, matches, rope and jars of paint thinner. Champ, a natural leader, urged the membership to come up with a nonviolent plan of action. “Aw, no!” shouted a former Black Panther at one of their monthly meetings. “That shit didn't work for Martin Luther King! How you think it's going to play out hear? By the way, I thought you had a reputation to keep.”

  Champ pursed his lips and let his tongue stroke a gold inlay before he replied, “Don't let your mouth overload your ass, Jack.”

  STAMPED OUT INTO THIS WORLD under the name Theodore Elijah Burnett, Champ was raised on a street in Philadelphia called Oxford. Early on he learned that a brick was as good for keeping other boys in line as it was for building a house. His father Jerome had managed to keep Theodore close to the front stoop of their Oxford Street row house and out of any real trouble until he died of a heart attack when Theodore was thirteen years old. After that, Champ's mother and older sister Shirley gave up trying, though not for lack of love. It was a matter of practicality. Who could expect a thirteen-year-old boy with ants in his pants to sit on his front stoop all summer when ten other boys were instigating him to “come on”? So he took to the streets with the other boys from Oxford Street, and together they refined their skills in a sport called gang war. After gang-warring with the boys from the Valley, the Zulu Nation up on Diamond Street, and the 16th and Norris Street gang, Theodore and his Oxford Street pals played a one-round elimination of fisticuffs to determine their leader. Theodore was the last boy standing.

  Though he wasn't the biggest or strongest member of the Oxford Street gang by any means, what he lacked in those areas he more than made up for in his viciousness. One or two blows with a length of pipe was never enough. He loved to hear the crunching and splintering of bones. One slice with a knife led to two-and another and another. He wouldn't stop the assault until his mind registered the urgency in his fellow gang members' voices when they shouted that the sirens were getting close and it was high time to beat feet.

  Theodore's troubles with the law began in the spring of his fourteenth year, when he and three other gang members went to see a Temptations concert at the Uptown Theatre one blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon. Waiting in line right behind him was a pretty red-boned girl from Norris Street, who was eyeing and vibing with Theodore when her older brother told him to find somewhere else to stand. Theodore smiled at the older boy and told him he didn't want any trouble. But the boy wouldn't just leave it at that. He profiled on Theodore, stuck out his chest and sneered, “I know motherfuckin' well you don't, chump!”

  After the show Oxford Street followed Norris Street down Broad Street and into an alley that was supposed to be a shortcut home but ended up being the scene of a homicide. On the day of Theodore's preliminary hearing the prosecutor sighed and told the judge there were no witnesses and no evidence other than the three evenly spaced holes in the dead boy's chest. Theodore and his homeboys were free to go.

  A week later Theodore's mother placed him on a Greyhound bus, destination Orangeburg, South Carolina, to spend the summer with his Aunt Beulah and cousins Joanne and Leon. They were waiting for him when the bus pulled into the small college town, and though he had only met his aunt once when he was five years old, he recognized her immediately for she resembled his mother right down to her marcelled silver-gray hair. She embraced Theodore tenderly and then introduced him to her beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter Joanne, and son Leon, who was Theodore's age. A chubby boy, Leon wore a mini-Afro, baggy bib overalls and peach fuzz on his chin.

  Aunt Beulah and her family lived in a two-story yellow clapboard house on the edge of a farm two miles outside of town. When they got out of the car, Theodore could smell the simmering aroma of food before he saw the steam rising from the pots of potatoes and collard greens on the stove, and the sizzling country ham and two hot fruit pies waiting on the counter.

  For the two months he was there, Theodore enjoyed the food the most and his cousin Joanne's complacency the least. She was a student at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, and on Friday evenings her college friends came to the house to eat pizza and talk. One evening while they were discussing a tragedy that had occurred on campus a few months back, Theodore and Leon were sitting at the kitchen table eating blueberry pie and drinking ice-cold milk chasers while they listened. Apparently, there had been some kind of demonstration on campus and the police arrived to try and break it up. When the demonstrators refused to leave, the police opened fire on them killing three students. With a mouthful of blueberries and a scowl across his face, Theodore told Leon he wanted to know the whole story. Leon informed him that Joanne had been on campus the night of the incident and she could relate all the details.

  And she did the next morning at breakfast. For three nights in February, she said, students had been peacefully protesting the failure of the town's only bowling alley to racially integrate. On the fourth night the students had lit a bonfire to stay warm, then the police came and extinguished it. Her friends started another one, and when the officers attempted to put out this second fire, some of the students threw rocks and bottles at them. What followed was a barrage of gunfire with students running in every direction. In the end three young black men were dead and twenty-seven other students lay wounded.

  “Most of them had been shot in the back,” she said.

  Theodore was enraged. “Why didn't the brothers have guns?”

  Joanne shook her head calmly. “We don't believe in violence, Cousin Theodore. At least the majority of us don't.”

  “Violence! You got to protect yourself, don't you? You can't let those honkies get away with that kind of stuff!”

  “Cousin Theodore, that's exactly the kind of thinking some of those young men over on campus have right now, and it's only going to lead to more violence.”

  “As Christians, Theodore, we don't believe in violence,” said Aunt Beulah.

  “What about an eye for an eye? Isn't that what the Bible says?�
� Theodore couldn't believe what he was hearing.

  “It does, son, but we are dignified people and must abide by the law.”

  “I'm leaving now, Momma,” said Joanna. “We're having a meeting with the Dean of Students this afternoon.”

  Aunt Beulah hugged her Bible and trembled. “Child, don't you be on that campus past dark. You make sure you're back in this house. I'm not fooling now.”

  “I'll be home, Momma. I promise.”

  The day was so hot that the cotton planters had come out of the fields early to find shade. The boys tried to beat the heat off with the breeze they caught while riding their bicycles as fast as they could down the back roads. When they met up with two of Leon's friends, one of them said the best place to be on such a hot ass day was in a swimming hole. “How bout old man Tucker's pond?” said Leon.

  “Too many of them water moccasins,” said one of the boys. “Let's go to the creek.”

  Theodore, who was deathly afraid of snakes, watched the boys ride off without looking back. When they were out of sight, he pedaled back to Aunt Beulah's house, propped Joanne's bike beside a shed and then did the strangest thing. He bolted as fast as he could through a cotton field without a clue into which direction he was running. When he got to the end of the first field, he ran straight into the next. At the end of this second field, he encountered a patch of woods and ran right through it. He tried to stay close to the road that led into Orangeburg, but he wasn't sure. With each twig his Pro Keds trampled and snapped, he ran a little faster.

  When he finally came out of the woods, he saw a garage up ahead on the edge of town. A black boy about Theodore's age was changing a tire on a rusted out pickup truck. The boy was barefoot and wore grease-stained overalls. The sweat on his ebony skin glistened in the sunlight. Theodore asked him where the University was located.

  “Straight down yondah on Main Street, pass them there traffic lights. All them buildings is the University, heah?” The boy looked at Theodore curiously. There was no mistaking him for a local boy, for most of them wore their hair thick and nappy, and Theodore's haircut was close to the scalp, in a high fade. That, and his jeans were pressed, tighter fitting, and double cuffed.

  “Good looking out, my brother,” said Theodore, and then he pressed on as if he was on his way to fight a rival gang.

  Beyond the traffic light he saw a large sign on the corner-Campus of South Carolina State University. Beyond the sign lay a maze of sidewalks and buildings. Young black men and women were walking in every direction. Theodore crossed the street and walked down the sidewalk until he reached the heavy shade of a magnolia tree. He could smell lemons and charred wood in the breeze and he could hear a conga drum faintly beating a steady rhythm. He looked around and saw groups of students sprawled out under the shade of the tree, some reading, some eating sandwiches, others napping and listening to music. There wasn't a white person among them and he was flabbergasted. For a while he stood there under the heavy branch of the magnolia tree where the air was cool and sweet. Fifty yards in front of him he noticed several students with books and backpacks leaving the main walkway and disappearing behind the administration building. Curious, he headed in that direction.

  When he turned the corner of the building a large group of students was gathered in a semicircle listening to one of their own who was shouting into a megaphone. The brother wore a blue and orange dashiki and a matching Yoruba hat.

  “…are African Americans citizens with rights just like anybody else, brothers and sisters! We are not animals to be slaughtered! Those racist pigs murdered three of our innocent young brothers only a few hundred feet from where we now stand! Right over that hill!” The speaker pointed in a northwesterly direction. “Henry Smith! Murdered! Samuel Hammond! Murdered! Delano Middleton! Murdered! And twenty-seven others were shot in the back! Why? I'll tell you why! Because they were exercising their right to gather in a peaceful manner! Because they were protesting the illegal segregation of a local bowling alley! They weren't carrying guns! Or knives! Or pipes! They were carrying schoolbooks! They weren't bothering anybody! It's time now! It's time to wake up, brothers and sisters! We've been sleeping for four hundred years! The white man will continue to annihilate our people until we wake up and take matters into our own hands! I say!... I say to hell with the president of this University. I say we demonstrate tonight! Now what do you say?”

  “Power to the people!”

  “Black power!”

  “We want justice!”

  “We want it now!”

  Theodore joined in the shouting. “We want justice now!” He punched his fist into the air. Someone had placed a stack of books on the grass and he picked one up, waving it above his head. “We want justice!” He weaved through the crowd until he approached the front. That's when he saw his cousin Joanne shaking her head in frustration. As she turned in his direction, she saw him and shouted his name. “Theodore! How did you get here?”

  “I ran,” he said. “All the way.”

  “Let's go! You can't be here. And where did you get Invisible Man from?”

  “What?”

  “That book. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Where did it come from, Theodore?”

  “I found it in the grass.”

  “You can't just take it. That book belongs to one of these students. You have to put it back.”

  She followed him through the crowd to the place where he had been standing when he picked up the book. He tossed it on the ground. “Why can't we stay?” he asked.

  “We just can't.”

  “Why not? These are my people too.”

  That was true, she told him on the way home. But the campus was no place for a fourteen year old boy who didn't know the first thing about white people from the South, even if he did know how to take care of himself, she added for his benefit. He asked her if she was going to attend the demonstration that night. She told him that holding another protest against the orders of the University president was just asking for more trouble and, no, she wasn't going to attend.

  “I wish I could go. That brother was right, you know. We have to start fighting back.”

  WITNESSING THE WRATH of those who had experienced the Orangeburg massacre lit a revolutionary flame in Theodore's heart and made him hate the white man even more than he already did. Three years after he returned from his trip to the South, he traded in his birth name for one that better suited his anger. Theodore Elijah Burnett became Brother Aziz X. Mohammed when he joined the Nation of Islam's Masjid Number Twelve located at Park and Susquehanna. It was the black pride and militant aspect of the organization more than the religious doctrine that appealed to him.

  At home his sister Shirley was first amused by her brother's newfound commitment to pressing his own clothes, polishing his shoes, and laying out his bow ties neatly on top of his scarred dresser. But when she gradually noticed the once-playful side of his personality was nowhere to be found, she began to take him more seriously. For hours at a time he practiced standing at attention in the middle of the living room, frozen like a statue, unblinking, a piece of handsome granite. Once a cockroach crawled all the way up his body and across his face and he never flinched. After that, Shirley gave him plenty of room whenever she passed his way. His mother, a devout Christian, was disappointed in his new religion, but pleased with his newly acquired discipline.

  Brother Aziz X. Mohammed was not just another new convert at the Masjid Number Twelve either. He was also the newest and youngest member of a squad that meted out discipline to the brothers who didn't have enough of it. It was a position at which he excelled and took more seriously than anything he had ever done. On his nineteenth birthday, he walked through the front gate of the Philadelphia House of Corrections, a full-fledged lieutenant in the Nation, and his fellow Muslims in tow addressed him as Brother Minister. Once again he was charged with murder, but this time it was no gang war murder. This time he was accused of killing a corner storeowner, motive unknown. The cause of de
ath-strangulation. The dead man was found fully disemboweled, hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling in the back room of his store.

  Inside the House of Corrections, Theodore's problems were compounded when he received word from the streets that there was a rat inside among the rank and file. One morning, the rat was spotted entering the security office after having just told his brothers he was on his way to the visiting room. Two days later the rat was found hanging in his cell with his guts dangling out in front of him and a finely honed shiv buried in his rectum. The story in the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that the rat had been an FBI informant waiting to testify against a group of Muslims from Masjid Number Twelve, who had allegedly driven a van to the Nation's Capital and massacred a room full of people. Brother Minister Aziz X. Mohammed and two of his lieutenants were charged with the jailhouse murder.

  Like the government and the rest of the establishment, the criminal justice system was, as far as Brother Minister Aziz was concerned, run by the same “white devils” who had massacred his Brothers in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Consequently, the last thing he wanted was a white man representing him in court. When he asked for black representation, the judge denied his request so he, in turn, refused to participate in his own defense. Whether it was the white attorney or the abundance of evidence they had against him, Brother Minister Aziz was convicted on both counts of murder. The judge gave him life for the street homicide and ten to twenty years for the jailhouse murder.

  By the time he arrived at Riverview Penitentiary, Champ was a seasoned leader of men who were born to follow. He loved his fellow Muslims, but he loved even more the brothers he had grown up with on Oxford Street. Blue Light. Omar Ali. Gus. Disco Bob. Big Jake. Shotgun. Cheese. Percy. Soul Train. And even crazy ass Fat Daddy. These were his homeboys and they were all there, doing time together.