by Paul Clemens
Sooner or later it was bound to be a problem, and sooner or later arrived the night I told my mother and father about the attack and its perpetrator. It was a longish monologue, delivered while my mother shook her head, occasionally crying, and my father sat in silence. While both responses were expected, the latter bothered me; although a reverent silence can, in some cases, be the most powerful response to such news, it didn’t seem, in this instance, to quite meet the moment. Did he hear what I was saying?
How could my father allow this, especially in light of what I’d just told him? Sixty-hour workweeks, Catholic school tuition payments, incredible hard work and struggle year after year after year—all, now, to be flushed down the toilet because some guy was nice? Life was a slippery slope—he was the man who’d taught me this, only too well—and yet here he was, allowing this stupid adolescent connection of my sister’s, which could only end badly, to strengthen. If my mother was right, and my father didn’t much care for this arrangement, how did he register his protest? He fixed the guy’s truck. Whenever it broke down, and it often did, there was my father in the driveway, even in the middle of winter, changing the brake pads or fixing the clutch.
My fury only deepened after we’d moved in together and began to receive telephone calls from prison, a couple calls a week over the course of a few weeks. The first time the operator asked me if I’d accept the call—I could hear a voice in the background pleading—I said that I would, out of some mixture of curiosity and confusion. “You’ve got to help me,” a black male voice said on the other end. “I shouldn’t be here. I need you—” I hung up, shaking.
Back in Detroit, I’d fielded my share of wrong numbers. My favorite calls were those from callers who asked me who I was—to which, really, there was only one response: You called me; who the hell are you? In fairness, only half of these callers were actually rude; the rest were intoxicated, but polite enough. And they were all persistent: the message that Shakira didn’t live here, that there was no Jamaal at this number, never seemed to sink in after one call.
The prison calls kept coming, though we couldn’t be sure if it was always the same person (we hung up immediately). Neither could we be sure how, whoever he was, he had gotten our number. We had nothing but questions, all of them unsettling: Was this the attacker? Had he been caught, in connection with another rape? Had he seen her name beside the mailbox of her old apartment building that night, and was this how he’d been able to track down her new number? Could convicts call information? Or was this just some anonymous criminal, someone totally unconnected to our lives, calling us repeatedly because I’d accepted the call that once?
How did he know our phone number? What was our phone number? I myself hadn’t a clue; I carried it around on a slip of paper in my pocket. I’d moved so much in the six and a half years since I’d left Detroit that the mailing addresses, apartment numbers, and phone numbers—nearly a dozen of each—were beginning to blur. The only reason I got my mail, much of the time, was because friends had taken over my old apartments, and brought it over in a bundle. If the calls kept up we’d have to move again, or at least change our number—again.
These calls, and the questions they raised, cut us to the quick, because it was only after such calls that we spoke of the rape in simple declarative sentences. Otherwise our references to her trauma were indirect, our sentences Jamesian. The “attack.” Her “attacker.” Such were the euphemisms we’d settled on. But one’s internal thought processes, having little need for euphemism, tend to be more blunt, and I felt caught off-guard when—grocery shopping, for instance—I picked up a pear. Pear: a perfect anagram. My mind just automatically switched around the letters in certain words—carpet, parade—to form that other word. More than once I thought: Am I nuts? Should I see a therapist?
One evening she walked into the apartment beaming. “Good news—my test came back negative!” Why she got the yearly test went unremarked on, and her happiness at the result—she needn’t worry about sickness anytime soon—struck me as one of the saddest things I had ever witnessed. Other references to the crime were completely unspoken. If we were walking down the street together, holding hands, and a black man approached, I’d sometimes feel a slight tug, directing me to cross with her to the other side of the road, where she’d feign momentary interest in something.
My questions always circled the subject. One night, after storing the query for months, I asked how she had got the scar on her upper arm. “Oh, that! That’s a cat scratch. We had a kitty when I was growing up, and he liked to crawl around your neck and shoulders. Usually he was gentle, but one night something spooked him . . .”
Sure. Okay. Could have been caused by a cat. I can see that.
We were working together at a bookstore until she finished her history degree. She worked in Arts, and I was in the Used Books department (read the first five letters of that last word backwards), where I spent a portion of each shift, when not talking to friends or flirting with the female employees, writing phony jacket copy for books. To replenish our stock, skids of used books arrived upon request from Paramus, New Jersey, the place where books go to die. Dozens of boxes arrived on the truck every month or so, sorted by category. It was part of my job to unpack them, price them, and put them on the shelves.
Opening these boxes was a quick lesson in the brute realities of the literary business. While some of the books were in fact used copies of titles published decades before, others were new titles that, having sold poorly, were clearly the publisher’s overstock, sent to us as a way to empty the warehouse. Sometimes a dozen untouched copies of the same book appeared in one box, occasionally even the book’s proof copies, included in which there would be an editor’s recommendation, extolling the unparalleled virtues of this particular novel or work of nonfiction. Bored, I began, mentally, to write blurbs for books that I invented on the spot.
After opening a box of Sociology/Current Affairs: “This is the story of a young black man, formerly angry, now simply bitter, who no longer wants to kill white folks—that’s all behind him—but who still wonders when he’s gonna get his, y’know what I’m sayin’? It follows him from the streets of Detroit, where he runs with the wrong crowd, to prison, where he receives a college education, to college, where a host of white professors and a handful of white girls nearly make him forget where he comes from. But only nearly. For in this honest and unflinching memoir, written in a lean, muscular prose . . .”
Still unpacking that same box: “In this moving work of urban reportage, a bearded man with tenure has set himself the difficult task of describing, in vivid detail and at long last, what it’s like to be a member of the impoverished black underclass in America’s fifth—sixth—no, seventh—wait, tenth-largest city. How does one combat such crushing hopelessness? Soul and a surprising strain of humor was his guess before beginning, but he decided to research this. Each and every weekday for the span of one year, he made the twenty-five-mile journey from northern Oakland County to Detroit’s Cass Corridor, in order that he might show white America what she is doing to the most helpless of her children. When, in the coming weeks, he is interviewed on National Public Radio in connection with the project, he will testify to the inextinguishable sacredness of the human spirit and the deep sickness of a society that allows . . .”
Outside of these angry thoughts I continued to function as a perfectly sane individual, going out of my way to be respectful and friendly to black customers. I didn’t understand those who said this wasn’t possible; it’s distinctly possible—simple, even, if from kindergarten on one has been schooled in the Catholic art of self-denial. Simply refuse to give in to your desires and force yourself instead into their opposites.
The strange part was that, even as I smiled politely, this friendliness didn’t feel at all forced—didn’t feel as if it were, in fact, the opposite of my deepest desires. Even as I threw out The Fire Next Time and fumed at the comments of Ellison’s characters, I found myself unable to
sustain that anger. (The book was replaced, the story reread.) Like many a failed misanthrope, I discovered that my abstract rage, when confronted by an actual human being who’d done me no wrong, simply dissolved. It was a disappointing thing to learn because empty sadness, which is what remains after hatred fades, isn’t the same expansive force. Whereas profound hatred can feel transfiguring, sadness just sits there.
At night she did homework—it was her last semester—and I revised my novel. What I had previously considered a boon—the material provided by my Detroit upbringing—now seemed an albatross. I recalled driving along I-94 years before with Shane, my college roommate, who’d come to Detroit on a visit. I told him, after declining another of his invitations to write for the school paper, that I was starting to write a novel instead. “If I can’t write a good book about Detroit,” I said, “I can’t write anything.”
It was harder than I thought. In the book’s original ending, the three kids, still armed to the teeth with dairy products after egging houses in wealthy Grosse Pointe, drive downtown and park near The Fist, intent upon egging the shit out of it. They fit nowhere—the suburbs, the city—and so are reduced to this impotent gesture. “We should have bought yolkless eggs,” one of them remarks. Though it had made no difference in Grosse Pointe, the symbolism of the all-white egg would have been better downtown.
And so they begin, to the accompaniment of alphabetic swearing. “Asshole!” one of them hollers, letting the first egg fly. “Bitch!” And so on, until they get to the letter n, when the scene fades out.
They were picked up by the Detroit police, the narrator says in a postscript, on charges of drunk and disorderly and destruction of public property. But nothing had been destroyed—the eggs washed right off—and there’s nothing disorderly, the narrator asserts, about civil disobedience executed in alphabetical order.
It was a sophomoric production, front to back. And I was losing touch with the material. The three “kids” were around twenty, the age I was when I began sketching my scenes. But I was now closer to thirty, and hadn’t felt much like a kid at twenty. The novel was set in Detroit, where I no longer lived. It mocked suburbanites—which, in a small way, my family now was. And with shattered statues of the Blessed Virgin strewn across its pages, the book had courted blasphemy in the hope that a little leeway might be granted a practitioner of the faith, which I no longer was.
Worse, it lacked gravitas. I’d treated the material—Detroit, race, class, Catholicism—as things to “play around” with, just as my father tinkered harmlessly in the garage with his less important hot rods. But this stuff was not to be trifled with, and I was no longer in the tinkering mood. I wanted the thing to go fast—now.
Though I still argued with Ellison and Baldwin, my best times were spent in the company of Malcolm X. It was time to return to the direct, extraliterary seriousness that only Detroit Red could provide. My copy of his autobiography was a tattered Grove Press paperback with a black and red border and a photo, taken during a speech, of Malcolm X on the cover, biting his lower lip indignantly and pointing toward something in the distance: the White Man, or Mecca, or maybe his old hometown back in mid-Michigan. I’d bought it, years before, at a used bookstore on Cadieux and East Warren. By the time I began to reread it for what I hoped would be the final time, years of being flipped by my fingers had taken its toll. The pages, full of highlights, underlinings, and marginalia, were beginning to fall out from the center, where the spine was most badly broken. In some ways, the book resembled the Norton Critical Editions that I’d had to read in college—editions in which, in a footnote at the bottom of the page, you could find out what the hell hypos meant in the first paragraph of Moby-Dick. My copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X was similar: there was the main text, along with a running commentary of my own along the bottom, sides, and top of the page.
When I’d first read it years back, I’d felt a faint adolescent desire to clench my fist in solidarity; on subsequent readings I’d simply hung my head. Now the arguments began. Oh, the disagreements we got into! Neither of us emerged unscathed; it seemed, at times, that we might never emerge at all. More than any fire-and-brimstone homily delivered during my Catholic school days, Malcolm’s book seemed to seal my eternal damnation, a fate I now began to rail against. White Hell, if I’d followed the book’s line of thinking correctly, was going to be an underground Mexico City: smog, congestion, really bad rush hours. “To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment,” says a priest in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist. “What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this.” I had, many times.
What I discovered when I reread Detroit Red was that I couldn’t read him at all, not anymore. I turned pages, saw letters, sounded out words, but no reading took place, in the sense of serious engagement with an author whose story I was willing to grant a sympathetic hearing. Passages that had charmed me in the past—his admission, at the beginning of Chapter 2, that he’d been beaten in a boxing match by a white boy, then pummeled again in the rematch—failed to make any impression. Whereas before I had been drawn to the good-humored modesty of the admission (“he knocked me down fifty times if he did once”), I now wanted to be that white boy, Bill Peterson. “I’ll never forget him,” Malcolm says.
My feelings about the book were bluntly antagonistic from the outset, or at least from the bottom of page two, where Malcolm discloses, with considerable distaste, that his maternal grandfather was a white man—a “white rapist.” For a page and a half I was fine, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X much as I’d read any other book. But at the bottom of page two, when I encountered the words “white rapist,” the reading stopped and the fistfight started.
In the very same paragraph, while discussing his mother, he says, “Of this white father of hers, I know nothing.” How, then, does he know the man was a rapist? Is this a metaphorical flight? Mere wishful thinking? No, it wasn’t possible to read beyond this point. It was a fight now (“A fight! A fight! A nigger and a white!” as the song had gone back at 6 Mile and Gratiot), and I suffered all the classic schoolyard symptoms: my palms sweat, my heart raced, I muttered to myself.
And I was certain that, unlike Bill Peterson, I was going to lose.
The most interesting observation in the autobiography, it seemed to me, came on page 268: “The white man—give him his due—has an extraordinary intelligence, an extraordinary cleverness. His world is full of proof of it.”
What’s revealing about this statement is that for most of his book Malcolm refers to the white man as the devil. So when he says what he says here—give him his due—what he’s really saying is, Give the devil his due. And from whom is he plagiarizing this phrase? From Shakespeare in the first part of Henry IV, wherein Prince Hal defends the character of Falstaff by saying that he “will give the devil his due.” Malcolm X, then, while giving surface praise to the white man, throws in a backhanded condemnation of the white man—that intelligence, obviously, only increases our malevolence—a condemnation appropriated, wholesale, from a white man. You could get lost in the layers of irony.
And there could be no doubt that Malcolm X knew from whom he was stealing this phrase, because Malcolm Little had done his reading in prison. Nowhere did I feel more of an affinity for him than when he was discussing his love of reading. It’s one of the great tensions in his book: his simultaneous love of learning and his hatred for bourgeois, educated blacks—one of them, a “‘token-integrated’ black Ph.D. associate professor,” who, Malcolm says, “got me so mad I couldn’t see straight.” And yet he ends the book by saying, “I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind. I’m interested in almost any subject you can mention.” Just before this: “My greatest lack has been, I believe, that I don’t have the kind of academic education I wish I had been able to get. . . . You
can believe me that if I had the time right now, I would not be one bit ashamed to go back into any New York City public school and start where I left off in the ninth grade.” I come close to feelings of love when I read such lines.
This bookishness begins in Chapter 11 with his prison reading. “In either volume 43 or 44 of The Harvard Classics I read Milton’s Paradise Lost,” he says. “Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, naturally, I read all of those,” he says. “Another hot debate I remember I was in had to do with the identity of Shakespeare,” he says. “The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English. . . . Well, Shakespeare’s language and the Bible’s language are one and the same. . . . In prison debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the nom de plume Shakespeare.”
Who gives a shit? Try as I might to focus on Malcolm’s literary pursuits, I kept coming back to the “white rapist.” Or, rather, he kept coming back to me, because he was everywhere in the book. In a sense this was consoling: however fixated I might have been, whatever mental disorder I might have been suffering from, it paled in comparison to Malcolm X’s problems. Chapter 12: “Yes! Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother’s father! If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me!” Chapter 14: “For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, ‘Do you hate me?’ ” Same chapter: “But what is this slavemaster white, rapist, going about saying! He is saying he won’t integrate because black blood will mongrelize his race! He says that—and look at us! Turn around in your seats and look at each other! This slavemaster white man has already ‘integrated’ us.” And so on.
