That was an invitation I would not miss. And, during my stay in New York and Harlem, I would accompany him home, on Fridays, when he closed his store, holding a brown paper parcel, wrapped and sealed with Scotch tape, under one arm, briefcase in the other hand, and under that arm, a copy of the New York Times in which his pleas for a proper choice of name, by the Times, were printed.
“She wouldn’t’ve been able to follow Janheinz Jahn! You think so?”
“Muntu is some heavy shit!” I say to myself.
I never did invite my new friend, Fred from the Amsterdam News, to Mr. Moore’s brownstone in Brooklyn. This was family, something to be kept within the clan, or the tribe; something I did not want to share with a black American. But Fred did not mind: because he did not know. He shuttled me round Harlem, showed me which steps to take to get to Father Divine’s temple; introduced me to some of the characters on the street, his friends included; and went with me, religiously, to the Red Rooster to wait like a detective, for James Baldwin to show up.
“Still looking for Jimmy, my brother?”
“This brother’s from Canada.”
“Canada?”
They did not think of Canada as a place that black people lived.
“Did you say Canada? Now, ain’t that a bitch!”
“Brother’s from Canada. Looking for Jimmy …”
“Ain’t that where there’s all that motherfucking snow, Jack? Snow like a bitch, bro!”
“And when you find Jimmy, what you gonna do with Jimmy?”
They all laughed heartily. I could not understand the reasons for their merriment. But I knew something “heavy was going down.” I would understand, later on.
“The brother works for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Don’t you see this big, heavy Niagara tape recorder-thing he’s carrying?”
“Been wondering what the fuck this thang is!”
“Jimmy’s in Greece!”
“Greece?”
“Been gone now … two-three months! Holidaying with them Greeks! Ain’t that a motherfucker!”
“Jimmy’s gone!”
“Jimmy’s gone.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Jimmy may never come back. Giovanni’s Room, brother. Jimmy’s gone to Giovanni’s room. In Greece.”
“Thought Giovanni was Eye-talian!”
And Fred stepped in, and made a suggestion. It was said in such an offhand manner, as if he was not serious, as if he was posing the question because he already knew the answer, and the impossibility of bringing off this interview.
“Try to get Malcolm. Get an interview with Malcolm.”
“With Malcolm X?”
The man of whom the New York commissioner of police said, with ironic prescience, that “Malcolm X is the most dangerous man in New York,” because he was able to surround the precinct that “served” Harlem, with hundreds of Muslims, when the police had arrested a member of their Black Muslim Mosque No. 7; on a trumped-up charge, they said. And then they had to release the man. He was a member of the Fruit of Islam, the men specially chosen and trained to protect Malcolm X, and the Honourable Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Muslims in America.
I had read many articles about Malcolm X. In the popular American magazines, especially Time and Life, and I had looked into the pages of Muhammad Speaks, the official organ of the Muslims in America. But I was not up to interviewing Malcolm X.
At this time, I was aware of a rivalry, and Malcolm’s disgust for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the biggest Negro organization in America, the NAACP. Malcolm’s opinion of Dr. King was simple. King was “a pork-chop-eating nigrah!” This condemnation has great psychological implications as it casts aspersion on Dr. King’s preferred dietary habits. The Muslims do not eat pork.
And it was the putting of this suggestion into a frame of possibility that I got a guided tour of Harlem. Fred took me to all the famous spots, including the storefront churches; and I sat in some of them and was “saved,” and was pulled through with the power of the music and the singing, the preaching and the testifying. But it was the music that ripped at my heart.
And so, now in Harlem, on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, I listened to this redeeming gospel, spilling over me from the mouths of the preachers and from the words of the songs, which to me sounded like jazz, like gospel music, like the blues, like the voices of black people, like the “’memberings” of slaves. And in a very real way of its perspiration, its rhythm, its character, and its noise, in its “coolness,” Harlem was not only a ghetto of the blacks, it was a plantation inhabited by slaves. Former slaves.
“Why ya don’t interview Brother Malcolm, brother?”
The suggestion rang in my head, and it did not receive the boastfulness with which I answered Harry J. Boyle’s question, months earlier, about my confidence to do the best interview the CBC would ever have of Baldwin. I was terrified by the suggestion. And even though I had read as much as I could about Malcolm X — who was already challenging Martin Luther King, Jr., for paramountcy among “the black masses,” as some magazine labelled these inhabitants of the urban black ghettos — in Ebony, in Life, in Newsweek, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, even in Muhammad Speaks, his own magazine, which I later found out he edited, I still did not feel I was up to this confrontation.
Fred took me into every storefront church he could think of, after we had visited the Muslim Restaurant on Lenox Avenue. This restaurant was historically singular. It did not serve anything made from pork. In Harlem? These dietary restrictions in Harlem? A culturally pork-eating society? Hog-maws, pork chops, barbecued ribs, the snout, the ears, the pig tails, the trotters — going to waste?
Who is this new Messiah? This new Deliverer, come to tamper with the fundamental backbone of Harlem’s culture? This therefore explained the insult Malcolm X levelled at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His face was always shiny. His face was always well-shaven in its healthy appearance. And this is why — and for other reasons, of course! — Malcolm X referred to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as “that pork-chop-eating nigrah!” At the beginning, at the time I met Malcolm X, there was this clear enmity: an absolute despising of the man, for his celebrity status, perhaps; for his success in leading peaceful marches that turned out brutal for those marching, in the image and philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. The Negroes, in their thousands, tasted the unwrapped, brutal, nasty violence of their “fellow Americoons,” as President Johnson, who, like George Bush the Second, did not understand entirely the pronunciation of certain words. And in fact, if you looked clearly, and without the white-liberal perspective, you could see that white Americans regarded black Americans as coons. Take for instance, the statements of another distinguished white American, the novelist William Faulkner, at this time of civil rights and the peaceful Negro demonstrations for voting rights, particularly in the South. Faulkner lived in Mississippi, and, like most Southern whites, advocated a “go slow” support of these demonstrations, warning white America, meaning the white North, that if this Southern attitude of “go slow” was ignored, there would be riots in the streets; blood would flow.
And, he thought fit to add, “if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.”
Faulkner was asked if he meant to suggest that Negroes were not also Mississippians, and whether he meant “white Mississippians.”
Faulkner could not explain the confusion, and probably compounded it by saying, “No, I said Mississippians — in Mississippi the problem isn’t racial.”
I had got fed up with the political and racial implications of staying at the Theresa Hotel. The condition of the bathroom that I shared with residents on the same floor — perhaps not the entire floor, but four or five rooms — made me use the small sink in my room as a bath. I was having “sponges,” as my mother would say. And I was using quite a lot of my stick of Ban deodorant. A
nd worse, I was always tired. Fred suggested I should get a room at the Harlem YMCA, which operated as a kind of headquarters for some Harlem social agencies. There I met the husband of Paule Marshall, and some other “important” men who worked in the Y. And I came face to face with an aspect of my West Indian culture. The pork chop! I thought of Malcolm’s derogatory remark about Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought of the clean menu of the Muslim Restaurant. And I thought of the pumpkin pie they served and how it had become a declared success there. But the pork chop was redeeming.
John Henrik Clarke was one of the “important” men I met at the Harlem Y. John Henrik was the editor of Freedomways magazine. I was impressed by the size and content of his library. The amount of books in his apartment rivalled the number in the bookstore owned by my Barbadian countryman, Richard B. Moore, and they rivalled those in the shelves of the House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda. And the second thing that impressed me was that John Henrik was married to a young woman. Much younger than himself. I do not know why this impressed me.
Between meals, my new black friends, all of them middle class, and supporters of that time, of the integrationist movement of the NAACP, adherents of the “go slow” philosophy toward desegregation, publicly voiced a passionate dislike of Malcolm X. His history as a pimp in Boston and later in Harlem; his imprisonment as a small-time crook; and his belligerence in proclaiming the suitability of the Nation of Islam as the only saviour of the black man in America, both stunned these men (and their wives) who were the “important” supporters of the image of the Negro, especially in the northern ghettos like Harlem, Newark, and Detroit.
Amongst the “enemies” of the Nation of Islam were celebrities such as the actress Ruby Dee and her husband, the actor Ossie Davis (who, with irony of unbelievable and unspeakable vindictiveness, delivered the panegyric that Malcolm’s assassination was identical and tantamount to the loss of “our manhood.”); Harry Belafonte, who was a staunch supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Sydney Poitier; in fact, almost all of the well-known actors and musicians were scared off from the Muslims. I thought they knew that they were being watched by the FBI; that they knew their careers could be tarnished, just as in the days when actors and screenwriters were accused of being communists in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations. And as contemporaries of Richard Wright and Paul Robeson, they knew what the FBI director could do to their earning ability. The exceptions were Leroi Jones, drummer Max Roach, and his wife, singer Abbey Lincoln. It can be argued, that at least through her interpretation of songs like “Mississippi Goddam,” and “Pirate Jenny,” and her other civil rights songs, that Nina Simone also, was more pro-Muslim. The conservative attitude of these modern-day Harlem Renaissance men and women underscored the possibility of the violence which they thought was near to the surface of things, and they still did not calculate the result of this violence, although they feared it would harm the relationship between black Americans and white Americans. As a matter of fact, soon after this period of broiling racial animosity, the cover of Look magazine bore the banner: “The Next Civil War.” Everyone thought that the “fire next time” had already come. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were convinced that it was bound to come, that “the fire’s” coming, and when it did, it was long overdue. “Chickens coming home to roost” was again applicable, though not desirable.
It was surprising, therefore, to have been aided by these middle-class, middle-aged men at the Harlem Y, in finding Malcolm X. Not that they no longer thought James Baldwin was a less worthwhile person to represent the despairing mood in the black community of Harlem — but, in fact, to represent the mood of all the black communities of America. It was, too, a matter, of being there, being in Harlem, and the pragmatism of exploiting the opportunity. So, Fred and I, carrying the heavy Nagra tape recorder, and the bag of twelve-inch audio tapes on my shoulder, would walk throughout Harlem, stopping occasionally for Southern-fried chicken, chicken-and-waffles, the regular Cutty Sark Scotch and soda at the Red Rooster, meeting strange men and strange women for the first two times, and then greeting them after the fourth time in that week, a regular now, hailing, “What’s happening, brother?”
“Ain’t nothing happnin’!”
“What’s happenin’s happnin!”
“Power to the people!”
And, late at night, exhausted by the walking of the perimeter, looking for Malcolm X, worn out by the weight of the Nagra, by the effect of too many Cutty Sarks, and with the Gauloises unfiltered cigarettes cutting a channel in my throat, making me cough like an exploding car stalled in summer, I would fall asleep, late at night, at the table in a restaurant, recovering from the long day of interviewing. And I would nod. And the manager would come over, and growl, “Mafucker, not in here! Git! Not in here!”
Could I claim racial discrimination? We were all black. In a black ghetto. Could I claim ethnic discrimination? I was not talking loudly to Fred. We were both too tired from walking along Fifth Avenue and Lenox Avenue, right down to the Harlem River, tracking down Malcolm X, to engage in conversation. But Fred, a resident of Harlem, knew the manager. So on this third time that I — we — were being thrown out, Fred confronted the manager, who told him why.
“Mafucker’s nodding, Jack! Don’t want no junkies in here, man!”
So, we knew. And I knew. And after this, I would think of using matchsticks broken into halves, to keep my eyelids open whenever I entered a restaurant in Harlem after midnight.
I had seen countless men, some of them no more than boys, at street corners, standing up, or in abandoned lifts left over from the era of imposing Harlem residences in which black people lived, nodding. And one man standing alone, would carry on conversations with himself. Some carried on intense conversations with invisible listeners. I had seen women, too, in these soliloquies of contemplation, copying the attitude of monks and pilgrims from the East. These men and women were nodding. They were on drugs.
“On the heavy shit!” Fred explained.
This is the irony: the police and those who lived downtown, regarded Harlem as the centre of national sin. And here now, was a Harlem black man running a small restaurant, and proclaiming his disagreement with that attitude that brands all black people as drug addicts, because of colour and residence. This small businessman’s attitude was a reflection of the image the Nation of Islam had stamped on Harlem: erasing the graffiti of self-destructive hopelessness scrawled on the tenements and apartments, from the face of Harlem. And it reflected, also, the new moral code that the Muslims were bringing to Harlem. This code was a clean mind, a clean body, a clean image. Harlem was being Muslimized. And, in the process, it was being given a new image. A new black image. Of heroes. And “brothers.” And “sisters.” Role models. Black men were becoming role models. Black men were redeeming themselves in front of their children, girls and boys. Black men were proud, were black nationalists, or “citizens” not of America, but of Africa, their new homeland.
When the head cleared, when the Scotch and soda was worked out of the system, and the long conversations into the night, that recorded a man’s baptism on the road of his personal Tarsus, when morning came, I was introduced to Jimmy Yeargans, a painter, and a friend of the Toronto painter, Gershon Iskowitz, a man who walked with the reality of Auschwitz gouged in blue ink into his arm. Jimmy had two sons attending college, and a Jewish ex-wife living upstairs in a brownstone. Jimmy was installed in the basement, serving as apartment and studio. It was Jimmy who encouraged me to continue to track down Malcolm X. He used his own network to help me visit the Muslim Mosque No. 7 in Harlem. And I visited another New York mosque of which Louis Farrakhan, a former Trinidadian calypsonian, was the minister. At this time, Malcolm and Farrakhan were “brothers.”
Malcolm continued to prove elusive. Not that he was hiding from me. He was out of Harlem. As I learned later, after the interview in New York, and later at my home in Toronto, Malcolm was a man who travelled all the time, taking Elijah
Muhammad’s “message” to the world. Malcolm was running the organization single-handedly.
I was getting tired: physically and emotionally. The Southern-fried chicken, the chicken-and-waffles, the late nights listening to jazz in the Harlem clubs and those downtown, like the Five Spot and Birdland, had already taken its toll on me. I was prepared to forget the interview of Malcolm X. I was going home. Home to Canada. On the new Underground Railroad, the Greyhound bus.
The question asked of me, in my search to find Malcolm X in Harlem, was the same, regardless of who asked.
“Why?”
I tried to explain to all of them: the waitress at the Muslim Restaurant, the man at the Muhammad Speaks newspaper office, the women dressed in long white dresses and white scarves, proclaiming a new, controlled, but nonetheless specific sexuality in this outfit meant to promote chastity and, at the same time, reverence of the black female body; and more than that, putting that black female body beyond the reach of the lasciviousness of the “nodding black man on the corner,” and, in particular, from the clutches of “the man,” meaning the white man who had had his fill of black women in various conditions of rape, of mistress, and of sadism. This new black Muslim woman, asked the same question.
“Why?”
I could have said many things. But I found myself claiming a loyalty to Canada, for the time being; a loyalty that spat in the face of American racial segregation, a loyalty that presented Canada, falsely, a moral superior to their “American cousins.”
“We,” I would tell them, mentioning multiculturalism in Canada, showing Canada as a symbol, Canada a neighbour, but superior to the United States, “we want to do an impartial interview with Mr. Malcolm X. We want to present him speaking in the narrative of his own words.”
This seemed to please the waitress in the restaurant. This seemed to please the newspaper reporter. This seemed to please everyone.
“We’ll get back to you.”
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