Ghosts in Our Blood - With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and The Caribbean

W I1ARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY
31111015159419
• V
MALCOLM X
in Africa,
and the
Caribbean
* i
m
$24.95
..lost thirty years after Malcolm X's assassination, his
autobiography continues to sell more than 150,000 cop-
ies a year, and a spate of books, articles, and films in
the 1990s have generated a groundswell of interest in
the man who redefined America through his analysis of
racism and his activism in the service of Black libera-
tion worldwide. But, in the process, as Jan Carew
observes in Ghosts in Our Blood, the significance of
Malcolm's legacy has often eluded us. "The real Malcolm,"
he writes, "was far more complex than the millions of
words written about him, the speeches that he made,
or the plethora of distorted images strewn in the wake
of his untimely death."
Combining the lyricism of the poet with the breadth
of the scholar, Carew, whose conversations with Mal-

colm in Britain influenced the revolutionary's thinking
toward the end of his life, captures Malcolm the intel-
lectual in pursuit of a new vision of race and a global
political movement uniting progressive Blacks and
whites. For the first time, readers will gain an intimate
knowledge of Malcolm's breakthrough to an interna-

tionalist vision following his historic trip to Mecca, his
travels throughout Africa, and his life among the Black
expatriate community in London. Central also to the
intricate discussions that transpire between Malcolm and
Carew is their common Caribbean heritage, which Carew
unfolds in the first full-fledged treatment of the history
of Malcolm's Grenadian and Garveyite mother.
Written by one of the major figures on the Pan-
African political landscape in this century, Ghosts in Our
Blood will deepen our understanding of the many forces

that shaped Malcolm X.
'
r1
IS
OUR
GHOST
3 JR
ll OD
With
MALCOLM X
in Africa,
England,
and the
Caribbean
LAWRENCE HILL BOOKS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carew, Jan R.
Ghosts in our blood with Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the
:
Caribbean /Jan Carew. 1st ed. —

p. cm.
ISBN 1-55652-217-7 $24.95. :
—
ISBN 1-55652-218-5 (pbk.) :
$14.95
1. X, Malcolm, 1925-1965. 2. Racism—United States. 3.
United States — —
Race relations. 4. Race relations Great Britain.
5. Great Britain —
Race relations. 6. Carew, Jan R. I. X, Malcolm,
1925-1965. II. Title.
BP223.Z8L57247 1994
320.5'4
,
092— dc20 94-2702
CIP
©1994 by Jan Carew

All rights reserved
Published by Lawrence Hill Books
An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
For Joy, Shantoba, the late Victor Ramzes,
and my friend and countryman Miles Fitzpatrick
PREFACE
The real Malcolm X was far more complex than the millions of
empty words written about him, the speeches he made at
different stages of his life, or the plethora of distorted images
strewn in the wake of his untimely death. Over the decades since
his death, there has been a concerted effort to iconize him and, in so
doing, to distance him further and further from the mother who
had given birth to him, his brothers and sisters, his wife and
children, and his ancestors.
By making him an icon, however, the host of idolators and —
their numbers increase with each new generation —are somehow
reenacting the Antaeus legend. The higher their iconized figure is
lifted above the earth, the weaker and more indistinct the real
Malcolm X becomes in their imaginations. As a result, they are less

inclined to heed his warnings and are more reluctant to live the
austere life he had chosen. Ultimately, they find it impossible to
truly dedicate their lives to the cause of Black liberation for which
he died. We need to bring Malcolm back to earth and to humanize
his memory. The time has come to frame him against the back-
ground of an extended family and then place him in the context of
the larger community of people in America and abroad who
influenced him and whom he, in turn, influenced.
By an accident of fate, I met Malcolm X at the end of the most
important fourteen months in his political life. In just over a year,
he had broken away from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam,
founded the Organization of African Unity and Muslim Mosque,
vii
MM GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD
Inc., made a second pilgrimage to Mecca, and declared in major

speeches, both in the United States and abroad, that he was willing
to join forces with all people fighting for freedom from oppression.
Itwas during these hectic months, too, that he was reunited with
his mother after twenty-five years.
Malcolm seemed to be racing against time during that final year
of his life. Between December 1964 and February 1965, he visited
Britain twice. In the course of those visits he made the most
sophisticated, brilliant, and conciliatory speeches of his career.
In early December, immediately after his second pilgrimage to
Mecca, he took part in a debate at the Oxford Union, one of the
most famous debating societies in the English-speaking world. On
February 11, less than three months later, he was invited back to
London by the African Society to address a large audience in the
Old Theatre at the London School of Economics. In both ad-
dresses, Malcolm moved the political discourse from civil rights to
human rights clearly and unequivocally that the Black
and stated
liberation strugglehad to be internationalized rather than ghet-
toized. He also affirmed with the passionate conviction that was
his trademark his willingness to work with people of goodwill
regardless of their race, color, or creed.

I was informed of Malcolm's presence in London while I was
attending a grand, very British reception at the Commonwealth
Institute to celebrate the first issue of Magnet, a newspaper I had
founded to reach the Black readership in Britain. Responding to a
last minute invitation to the reception, Malcolm turned up, dis-
playing grace and impeccable good manners as I introduced him to

friends, acquaintances, diplomats, and journalists. Our conversa-
tions, which form the basis for this book, began late that night of
the reception and continued over the next two days until his speech
at the London School of Economics.
Little did I know that these conversations would be my first and
last with this inspirational revolutionary. A week after returning to
Malcolm X would be assassinated.
the United States,
When Malcolm came to Britain, he was welcomed by a Third
World immigrant population drawn mostly from the West Indies,
Jan Caren ix
Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. As a descendant himself from

a Grenadian mother, as a Pan-Africanist and a Garveyite, and as a
Muslim, Malcolm in 1965 could reach people from a broad range
of backgrounds.
Of all that I knew about Malcolm X, what intrigued me most in
the years after his assassination was that his Grenadian mother had
been almost invariably passed over in biographical writings about

him. was not convinced firmly of the importance of this missing
I
Caribbean link until I was visiting Bacolet, Grenada, in 1980 and
happened upon the village matriarch, Tanta Bess. The oral tradition
is alive and well in Tanta Bess, who had grown up with Louise
—
Langdon Louise Langdon Norton Little, Malcolm's mother.
Listening to Tanta Bess I could hear echoes of my mother's voice as
she sat at the head of a long table supervising my history homework,
inquiring wisely: "Didn't these great men in your history book
Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, and the others —have grandmothers,
mothers, sisters, aunts, wives, or did they just fall out of the sky like
stones?" I discovered in talking with Tanta Bess that Malcolm did

not just fall out of the sky like a stone but that the man he would
become was shaped in no small measure by his Grenadian mother.
And yet, my conversations with Malcolm in 1965, my chance
encounter with Tanta Bess more than a decade and my later,
growing interest in exploring the influence of Louise Little on her

famous son were not brought into clear focus until I met Paul Lee,
a bright young research scholar, who introduced me to Malcolm's
brother Wilfred in 1990. Wilfred, I soon learned, was not only one
of Paul's mentors, he was also the mentor to several generations of
Black youth in Detroit.
My first serious conversations with Wilfred took place in 1991
at his home in Detroit and at mine in Bloomington, Illinois. In
talking about his mother, he also provided insights into life in the
Little household in Omaha, Nebraska (where Malcolm was born
in 1925); in theIndiana Harbour (East Chicago) area, where Earl
Littlewas the chief representative of Marcus Garvey's Universal
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); and in Lansing, Michi-
gan, where the family moved in 1928.
GHOSTS IN OIR BLOOD
Both Earl and Louise Langdon Norton, who had met at a

Little
Garveyite meeting in Montreal in 1918, were profoundly influ-

enced by and devoted followers of Garvey and his UNIA. Garvey
was a self-educated Jamaican who had emerged from anonymity in
the early twentieth century to create a worldwide Black nationalist

movement. His UNIA was based in the United States and had its
largest mass following there. He had declared: "I know no national
boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my
province until Africa is free." After meeting in Montreal, Earl and
Louise were married in 1919 and moved to the United States,
where they raised seven children, of whom Wilfred was the eldest
and Malcolm the fourth.
Wilfred insisted that his father never was a Baptist preacher as so
many biographers have claimed. He was, Wilfred declared em-
phatically, a Garveyite activist whom sympathetic Black ministers
allowed to address their congregations from time to time. When
Earl Little was in his prime, Wilfred asserted, "he was the strongest
man I ever knew." But he was crushed under a streetcar in Lansing
in when Wilfred was twelve and Malcolm six. Louise Little
1931,
and other UNIA members believed that Earl was beaten and
thrown to his death by vigilantes from the Black Legion, a splinter
group of the Ku Klux Klan.
Perhaps most important for a complete portrait of Malcolm X,
Wilfred painted a vivid picture of his mother's courage and
perseverance in maintaining her family's life after the untimely
death of her husband. The Louise Little portrayed by Wilfred was

a talented and courageous woman who was consistently treated
with cruelty and insensitivity by racist and sexist officials. The
culmination of this tale of persecution came in 1939, when Louise,
on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was committed to the
Michigan state mental hospital at Kalamazoo. She would remain
there for twenty-five years until Malcolm and other family mem-
bers had her released into their care. Malcolm is reputed to have
said that his reunion with his mother was the happiest moment of
his life.
I was impelled to write this book so that new dimensions of

Jan Carew xi
Malcolm X's life could be brought to light. In the course of a

relatively short lifetime, Malcolm threaded his way through a
bewildering array of experiences that mirrored the inequalities, the
tensions, the racism, and the hope in our society. His principal
legacy is his examination of the United States and its worldwide
imperialist extensions from the bottom looking upward. Conspic-
uously absent from his often searing analysis of race and class in
America and abroad, therefore, was any trace of the dishonest
intellectual palliatives that scholars from both the left and the right
use to obfuscate the truth as they peer from the top looking
downward. He taught us that it is the duty of leaders to be as
devastatingly critical of their own mistakes as of their opponents'.
During my conversations with Malcolm, he never failed to state
unequivocally that the system he was attacking was one based on
unbridled greed, on the exploitation of one race by another and
one class by another, and that it had to be radically transformed.
He also made it clear that his role as a leader was not just to analyze
the world, but to change it.
ONE
The tigers of wrath are wiser
than the horses of instruction.
—William Blake
An obscure vision, obscure because he dared not free it
from his consciousness and examine it; he was content

to half look at it, and seek no explanation.
—Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Corn
was a February morning in Wimbledon when I heard the news

It
ofMalcolm X's assassination.
On that fateful morning, as I lay in bed, the sun's eye twice
peered through slits in low-hanging clouds that were scattered
above London like looted bales of soot-smudged cotton. It was as
if that luminous eye was surveying my southwestern corner of
London with a furtive glance, scanning rooftops, vehicles beetling
their way through wet streets, dark trees with skeletal limbs raised
imploringly toward heaven, and stretches of Wimbledon Common
carpeted with dead leaves and frost-singed grass.
By the time the second shaft of sunlight had shot through my
bedroom window, I was already fully awake. I thought of going for
my usual run on Wimbledon Common, but I was tired after having
1
GHOSTS IN 01 R BLOOD
barely snatched four hours sleep, and my good intentions evapo-

rated like apparitions in a fog. I turned on my side and noticed a
patina of frost on the branches of the gnarled copper beech in my
back garden. A pair of starlings, perched on a high branch, fluffed
out their feathers and huddled close together.
I spoke softly to the starlings, but they buried their heads in their
feathers and for a moment I wished that I could bury my own head
under the covers for the rest of my life.
If you were like me, a Black man from Guyana living alone in an
old Victorian house after an acrimonious break with an angry
English wife and four bewildered children —three English step-
daughters and one of my own —talking to birds, plants, trees,
anything that was alive but not human, would seem to be a
perfectly natural thing to do. Besides, Magnet, the weekly Black
newspaper I was had finally rolled off the press at the end
editing,
of a hectic twenty-hour workday, and I was still in a stupor of
exhaustion.
But the sunlight, even appearing and vanishing as swiftly as it
had done, also awakened some sleeping thoughts that burned so

brightly in my brain that even after pulling the covers over my head
I could not banish them.
"What am I doing here in this inhospitable country with its
miserable climate?" I had often done on so many

asked myself as I
twilight-mornings. "You're a man from a land of sun and trade

winds and a sea of evergreen forests. Why on earth " But I'd
—
invariably cut short that sorry-for-myself lament and remind
myself loudly, "Well, you can't eat sun or drink the trade winds.
Besides, the British are there in your country living off the fat of the
land. And even if they left, they'd still be sucking its wealth dry
from across the Atlantic. So whether or not the British are cold,
boorish, racist to the marrow of their bones, and the English
climate is lousy, you'd better just stay here and collect a little of
what they owe you."
The fact is, though, that I had ended up in Wimbledon, a
middle-class English sanctuary, because the former owner of my
house, a Trotskyist member of Parliament with an eccentric
H
Jan Carew
disdain for his comfortable, middle-class legacy, had sold it to me

for a song. Coming had been perfectly natural. After all,
to Britain
it had been dinned into my head from as far back as I could
remember that England was the "mother country." Then, too,

having arrived in London, I found that my colonial middle-class
education helped to round off some of the sharp edges of the initial
culture shock. This education included studying Latin, English,
and European history along with a wide spectrum of English
literature. What was studiously avoided was anything related to
the history of Guyana, outside of its colonial connections. It was
also because of this colonial education, which a cynical classmate
had declared was designed to make us stupidly loyal to king,
country, and the Union Jack, that I had christened my Wimbledon
residence "The House of Despair."
"How come you chose such a morose name for your house?"
several friends had inquired.
"Everybody chooses cheerful, grandiose, or cute house names,
so I decided to be different," I'd explain, but the real reason was
more complicated. The truth is that when the solicitor was show-
ing me around the house for the first time, he'd said facetiously that
"this Victorian mansion is divided into three parts, like Caesar's
Gaul." And the mention of Caesar's Gaul immediately took me
back to the days when I was a student at Berbice High School and
had to study Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War for my
junior Cambridge Latin exam. The rush of memories made me
inattentive to his very English voice describing the property in
some detail.nodded and smiled foolishly while remembering how
I
Ramotar, a Hindu classmate who was a midnight-black Madrasee

with shiny patent-leather hair and glittering eyes, had told me quite
matter-of-factly: "You know, the blasted Julius Caesar, whose
work we keep reciting like parrots, suffered from fits."
"Fits? Caesar?" I recalled asking incredulously, because this
piece of information about the great man's human frailty was
suddenly far more interesting to me than his conquest of Gaul.
"Yes, the damn man was an epileptic! Don't you remember the
words from our memory passage in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:
4 GHOSTS IN 01 R BLOOD
and when the fit was on him, I didmark

how he did shake; 'tis true, this god did shake.
His coward lips did from their color fly . .
Years later, I came to regret that I didn't listen more carefully to

the solicitor when he was showing me around the house. An
unusually heavy snowfall and the prolonged cold spell that came in
its wake caused the outside pipes to burst and sprout stalactites,
and I had to live without running water for weeks.

The House of Despair turned out to be a very appropriate name
for my Wimbledon residence, since, in addition to burst pipes, my
bittersweet life in London was strewn with love affairs, anticolo-
nial activity, solitary periods of writing and painting, and wild
spells of carousing followed by bouts of melancholy. Then there
was that painful, traumatic discovery that we people of color make
after arriving in the "mother country" and finding out, with a
naive colonial dismay, that there's no black in the Union Jack.
Visitors who traveled by subway, after leaving Wimbledon
station, walking up High Street, and laboring up the steep hill to
my house invariably accused me of failing to warn them that the
hill was "a brute." Winded West Indian visitors would sometimes
even accord a living, patriarchal personality to the hill by declar-

ing, 'That's a hill-father, man! That blasted hill separates boys
from men!"
I was the "only one," the sole on R Street.
West Indian living
Guests who did not know my exact address could knock on any
door along the street and ask about the house in which a tall Black
man lived, and with an excessive show of British middle-class
politeness, any neighbor could direct them to number 58.
As I was sitting at the side of my bed with a blanket wrapped

around me, J.D., a Jamaican friend who worked for the BBC,
phoned.
"You heard the news?"
"What news?" asked. I I knew from the agitation in his voice
Jan Carew
and the fact that he had shed his BBC British accent that something
calamitous had happened.
"Malcolm, man."
"Malcolm?"
"Yes, man, Malcolm X, him dead, assassinated, them blew him
away. Rass, man, the Brother was here only twelve days ago! Just
over a week! Jesus Christ! And now them gun 'im down in the
Audubon Ballroom where he was gwine talk 'bout his Organiza-
tion of Afro-American Unity! Is what him did say,
the God's truth
that he was a marked man and some folks high up in Yankeeland
had passed a death sentence 'pon 'im. That them folks was more
powerful than Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslims
remember how him did say that the triggermen, the bombers or
whoever them send 'gainst him would be the puppets, and above
them would be a puppetmaster pulling the strings. If only the
Brother did listen to us, eh! We did tell him say that he should live
for the struggle, not die for it
—
" His voice broke off, and I could
hear someone talking to him.
"J.D.?" I said, urgently, because I wanted to hear more.
"I've got to go, old chap. I'm being summoned. The BBC
treadmill calls. Will contact you later!" Almost as naturally as
breathing, J.D. had switched back to an impeccable British accent.
J.D. hung up before I could ply him with questions. I rushed
downstairs to switch on the television. But standing before the
charcoal-gray screen, I changed my mind. If Malcolm was indeed
dead, then I'd defer facing that ugly reality for the moment. I
wanted him to be alive, and if I ignored the TV news for a while I
could pretend that he was, that he'd taken our advice and gone into
hiding. I slumped down on a couch, and it was as if the wind
outside had sneaked under the French windows in my study and
gripped my heart with icy fingers. "Why did you choose to die,
Malcolm?" I shouted at the empty room. "Don't we have enough
martyrs? It's time that we lived for the struggle, and not just keep
dying for it!"
When I finally switched on the television, images of a body lying

(> GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD
on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom appeared on the screen, and

an impersonal voice confirmed that Malcolm X had been assassi-
nated. The dead man's face, with its pale, frozen, death-mask look,
burnt itself into my mind and consciousness and would remain
there for the rest of my life. Decades have gone by, but that face still
appears in my mind's eye at odd moments, intruding into thoughts
far removed from Malcolm and his tragic and premature death.
I have never been able, however, to fit that masklike visage onto
the one of the Malcolm with whom I had gaffed and laughed and
bantered and swapped reminiscences only twelve days before his
death. had also debated with him passionately, weighing every
I
word, whether it was better to live for a cause than to die for it.
Those images of the dead Malcolm that remain with me the —

corpse on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom and the body lying in
state in the Unity Funeral Home as mourners crocodiled their way
past to pay their final respects —are like another memory passage
that was drummed into my skull when I was still a student at
Berbice High School:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Perhaps, too, when a vision of the dead Malcolm flashes across

my mind as it does every now and then,am in fact looking into a
I
mirror and seeing a reminder of my own mortality. The curious

thing, though, is that the vision of Malcolm, alive or dead,
invariably comes to me in three dimensions. It is as if a permanent
Jan Carew
hologram had imprinted itself on my unconscious mind during our

illuminating encounters in Britain.
Later, when I switched on the television again, there were
pictures of Malcolm lying in a highly polished casket. His eyes
were closed and the white linen shroud framing his face made it
seem darker. A British reporter covering the funeral seemed bent
on soliciting reproofs about Malcolm's "extremism" from some-
one in the crowd. But the men and women answering his inane
questions silenced him with their passionate affirmation of loyalty

to their dead hero.
Malcolm's body was wrapped in the seven white linen shrouds
that a traditional Muslim burial requires. A Harlemite, in all
seriousness, declared afterwards that the tears of thousands of

mourners falling on the polished floor of the Unity Funeral Home
had flooded the room until the last of the bereaved had floated
away on a river of sorrow.
The pictures of Malcolm's funeral were replaced on the screen
by others depicting the fighting in Vietnam. I looked for Black faces
among the white ones, but they were all painted black. I told myself
that Malcolm would have seen the cruel irony of it all whites in —
blackface invading a nation of brown people.
The news continued with the announcer pontificating about the
Armed Forces Council of South Vietnam having replaced Lieuten-
ant General Nguyen Khanh as commander in chief. And I thought
that the puppet-masters in Washington were once again prodding
their military satraps in Vietnam to play a political game of musical
chairs. The announcer droned on, but I no longer heard what he
was saying. I knew that the fatuities he was mouthing had been
filtered through sieves of stringers, correspondents, military cen-
sors, subeditors, and editors until the words were completely
divorced from the images being flashed on the screen.
I told myself, "It's only minutes ago that these very commenta-
tors were portraying Malcolm as an angry Black Savonarola
pointing an accusing finger at his enemies, his eyes glaring behind
rimless glasses like the mother-of-pearl eyes embedded in an
African devil mask."
a GHOSTS IN OIR BLOOD
I felt sad, desolate, and helpless about the way in which those
demon images sought to obliterate the soft-spoken, gentle Mal-
colm whose breeding and good manners had been inculcated in
him from birth by his Grenadian mother and his rural Georgian
father; the laughing, witty Malcolm; the pensive, lonely Malcolm;
and the restless, caged Malcolm pacing up and down and express-
ing opinions that burnt their way into one's consciousness like
incandescent flares. If only his detractors could have glimpsed
those other sides of Malcolm, they would have understood why
Ossie Davis could say in his eloquent and moving funeral oration
that "Malcolm was our manhood, our living Black manhood . . .
our own Black shining prince."
I met Malcolm when I was the editor of Magnet, the first news-
paper attempting to reach a nationwide Black readership in
Britain. Malcolm, in London to give a speech at the London School

of Economics, had arrived on the day that a reception was being
held at the Commonwealth Institute to celebrate the first issue of
Magnet coming off the press.
As this grand reception was getting into full swing, a liveried
majordomo announced the arrival of distinguished guests with
stentorian flourishes that could be heard above the hum of
conversations and subdued laughter. The stamp of Englishness on
this gathering was unmistakable despite the expressionistic splash
of colorful costumes and the rainbow array of races moving about
in the spacious hall.
While I was talking to a German foreign correspondent, my

Jamaican editorial assistant, Dermot Hussey, tugged at my sleeve
and steered me toward a corner of the hall.
Dermot's large Diego Rivera eyes were focused on me like glass

bulbs with fireflies in them. I couldn't help but notice how those
eyes stood out from round face with its mandarin beard and
his
mustache. Usually, there was also a mandarin calmness about him.

A Jamaican countryman of his who was small, waspish, and
perpetually drunk had once observed, while sprawled on a couch
Jan Carew 9
in my living room, "Jan, there are two races on earth —talkers and
listeners — and Brother Dermot's a listener."
But on this occasion, an unusually excited Dermot became more
of a talker than a listener when he announced in a hoarse stage
whisper, "Malcolm's in town, man!"
"Malcolm?"
"Yes, Malcolm X! He's in town, man! Malcolm X is in town!"
"Then go and bring him to the reception," I said.
A music critic and civil-rights activist, Dermot had a passion for
Black music that bordered on fanaticism. He was also a denizen of
nightclubs, cafes, restaurants, and other dives that night people
patronized during the midnight to dawn hours. As a result, an
underground network of friends, hustlers, musicians, music lovers,
fellow journalists, and hangers-on invariably tipped him off when
prominent Black Americans were in town.
Dermot roamed the midnight jungle of London, rubbing shoul-
ders with folk who woke up to daylight only in the late afternoon.
The neon lights necklacing buildings like illuminated lianas and
the faces glowing momentarily under streetlights like black,
brown, yellow, or white night orchids never failed to fascinate him.
Itwas during a late-night Notting Hill Gate safari that an African

friend had tipped him off about Malcolm's imminent arrival.
Dermot weaved his way through the crowd, dodging waiters
carrying trays full of drinks or hors d'oeuvres, and in just over an
hour he returned with Malcolm in tow. When the majordomo
announced, "Mr. Malcolm X," conversations were muted for a
moment and all eyes turned toward the tall man entering the great
hall.
Malcolm towered above the crowd, and there was a cool

alertness about him as Dermot led him toward me.
"This is Malcolm X," Dermot said, and as we shook hands the
easy banter between us disguised our private thoughts, our real
impressions of each other. My first impression was one of utter
surprise and disbelief. Was this indeed the dark, menacing man
whose picture I had seen emblazoned on the pages of so many
10 GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD
journals? For even after being recently exposed to the African sun,
he was still light-complexioned, and his gray-green eyes reminded
me of my late grandfather's. That venerable had been a
relative
village schoolmaster, and folks used to whisper behind his back
that he had cat's eyes. And like my grandfather's, Malcolm's eyes
could change from gray-green to a pale blue or a luminous gray
flecked with gold according to the color of his moods, the color of
his clothes, or the colors around him.
My eleven-year-old daughter Lizaveta was with me, and when I
introduced her to Malcolm, even with a crowd of admirers around

him, he managed to give her his full and to put her at ease
attention
almost immediately with a natural graciousness and good humor.
He told her that he had daughters, too, and that one of them
actually looked like her. It was obvious that he was good with
children, that they recognized a kindred spirit in him at once, for
after her initial shy and halting exchanges, she relaxed, and they
were soon chatting together like old friends. She whispered to me
afterwards, "He's nice," and looking toward him with a special
smile that up her face only when she trusted someone, she asked
lit
rhetorically, "Why do they say he's a bad man? He's tall like you,
and he looks like he could be your brother."
That was her way of putting her own private stamp of approval
on Malcolm. Usually, adults treated her with a patronizing disre-
gard which she hated, but he had really paid attention to her and
made her feel like an intelligent being who had something worth-
while to say.
"We're both red people," I explained to her jokingly, "and if he
went anywhere in the Caribbean, people would immediately
assume that he was a native son. That's until he spoke, because the
moment he opened his mouth and said a few words, they'd know
that he was a Yankeeman."
As I looked around the hall that night, I couldn't help thinking
that there was something incongruous about a radical Black
newspaper being launched at the Commonwealth Institute. This
relic from a dwindling British Empire was formerly known as the
Imperial Institute. It was an unlikely setting for a friendly encoun-

^8
Jan Carew 11
ter with a man whom the media had consistently depicted as a fiery
advocate of Black liberation. The reception, complete with major-

domo, was, on the surface, reminiscent of past occasions when
victories over rebellious natives were celebrated with the same
pomp and ceremony.
After the majordomo announced the arriving guests, they shook
hands with a welcoming committee headed by Rudolph Dunbar.
Rudolph, a Guyanese, was the European correspondent of the
Associated Negro Press and one of the directors of Magnet. He was
also a famous clarinetist and conductor and one of the Black
old-timers who'd been living in London since the early 1930s. I had
been opposed to an expensive and grandiose reception in a setting
replete with symbols of the glory days of empire, not to speak of
the trappings of white British male supremacy, but I had been
outvoted by Rudolph and the other directors. The imperial sym-
bols and trappings I was denouncing were the very ones they had
been brought up to worship, and they were willing to pay any price
to co-opt them for one night.
Rudolph was mired in the belief that a self-appointed Black
aristocracy had a divine right to lead the Black liberation move-

ment. He dismissed the majority of Black immigrants to Britain as
"riffraff who were letting the side down." Although I disagreed
with this, the writer and artist in me found Rudolph's contradic-
tions interesting. Despite his pompous and bigoted ideas, which he

would express with a hoity-toity, upper-class British accent, he was
kind and generous and compassionate and, drunk or sober, was an
excellent raconteur. Malcolm later complained to me that he didn't
understand half of what Rudolph had said to him when they met,
and I intimated that this was probably a blessing.
Rudolph was in his element that night. Decked out in white tie
and tails, he greeted the dignitaries like a lord welcoming guests to
his castle, and although Malcolm and I were out of earshot, I was
certain that according to the status and rank of the guest, he was
accompanying his welcome with the right kind of upper-class
haw-haw sounds and appropriate throat noises.
Malcolm, keeping his eyes fixed on Rudolph, was clearly fasci-
nated by the performance of this Black would-be aristocrat. I
leaned over and said, "When I get a chance, I'll tell you about
Rudolph."
"Yes, please do," he said, guardedly, never taking his eyes off
Rudolph.
After a pause, I said, "My Afro-Carib great-gran used to say that
the only perfect humans were illusory ones like the Virgin Mary,
the risen Christ, and the Messiah who is yet to come."
Malcolm's tone was conciliatory when he turned to me, smiled,
and said, "Too bad I didn't come across your great-gran during
those years when I believed that Elijah Muhammad was a divine
leader and that women were weak. But now, I'm learning
—
"Tolerance?" I inquired, finishing the sentence for him. Taken
aback, he looked at me wondered if I'd offended
searchingly, and I
him. But he smiled again and answered, "Yes, and good sense too."
"You'll need plenty of both when dealing with Black people
here," I cautioned.
"As if I don't I need truckloads of it back home too!" he declared
with a chuckle.
The reception ended with guests who'd had too much to drink
lurching uncertainly toward the front entrance and being ushered
out by uniformed guards. Rudolph, incoherent, happy about the
was led away by a friend.
reception and obviously deep in his cups,
A journalist from overseas whom I'd met earlier when he was
downing Scotch as if it were lemonade, was now in the ultimate
state of drunkenness. Tiptoeing unsteadily, gesturing like a mar-
moset, mumbling to himself, and occasionally bursting into song,
he slipped on a piece of smoked salmon and fell. Impersonal and
immaculately dressed waiters and waitresses stepped over him very
deftly as he lay stretched out on the floor. He groped for the
offending slab of salmon, retrieved and began to gnaw at it. A
it,
hefty guard picked him up like a rag doll, and with his feet barely
touching the ground the journalist and his piece of salmon were
deposited in a taxi.
Dermot and I escorted Malcolm to his taxi, and before we parted
Jan Carew 13
we agreed to meet in his hotel room at seven-thirty the following
morning.
During the long drive back to Wimbledon, and with Lizaveta fast
asleep in the backseat, Dermot and I relaxed and indulged in a bout
of West Indian gaffing as we reminisced about the reception and
our meeting with Malcolm.
"I can hardly wait for tomorrow to come. After I put Lizaveta to
bed, I'll write down the questions I want to ask him."
"Then you're not going to get much sleep, Brother Man. It's
almost midnight already. I'm a night bird, as you already know. I
catch up on my sleep in the daytime. You don't."

"Tell me something, how did you persuade the man himself to
come to the reception?"
"He was a bit cautious at first. Then he remembered me from
three months ago when he made that four-day stopover for the
Oxford Union debate. So I told him about the paper and said that
his presence would mean a great deal to us, and presto! he came."
"That sudden decision of his to come to the reception must've
thrown the spies tailing him for a loop. They wouldn't have known
what the hell was going on. And can you imagine one of them
following him into the reception hall, and the majordomo an-
nouncing, 'Mr. Malcolm X!' and then, 'Mr. John Doe, from the
CIA!' That would really have created a sensation. You know, I didn't
want us to waste money on that lavish reception, but Malcolm's
turning up made me change my mind. Besides, I kept telling myself
that after everything's said and done, old colonial fantasies die hard.
To really understand how important Garvey was, you have to over-
look the farcical business of his being decked out in the uniform of a
British colonial governor. It was the same kind of strange behavior
rearing its head tonight at the Commonwealth Institute, so I kept
telling myself, 'Look beyond the pure theatrical farce of backroom
boys strutting in the front parlor for a night. Let them enjoy them-
selves. Tomorrow, we'll all be involved once again in getting out the
next issue of Magnet. Old Rudolph, with his ruthless flair for the
limelight, was in his element, eh! I detected complete bewilderment

in Malcolm's eyes when he was trying to figure him out. I felt sure he
was thinking that no matter how much of an aristocrat this pompous
ass thought he was, some of the whites were still seeing him as a
born-on-the-stroke-of-midnight nigger who was giving himself airs.
But Malcolm's lonely, eh! In the midst of those hundreds of guests, he
was alone. He reminded me of a greenheart tree in the rain forest. It
always stands by itself, tall and distinct in the midst of thousands of

other species."
"But the Brother has bags of charisma, eh! The minute he
stepped into the main hall, all eyes were on him, and there he was,
alert and on his guard all the time."
"And did you notice how his hands speak all the time, even when
they're in repose? Liza pointed this out to me. That child's shrewd
as the devil, eh!"
"On top of everything else, the Brother has the malice to have
gray-green eyes, reddish hair, and a light complexion. . . . But you
know something, I never met anyone in my born days who's more
alert than he is. He's a real Yankeeman from the city —that
Brother's got eyes in front, at the back, and on both sides of his
head."
"Man, the moment he set foot in that hall, though, every pretty
woman seemed to gravitate toward him. Still, as they say in
Harlem, he was cool as a mountain pool. He kept those admiring
women at a distance with his eyes and reserved manner, and yet
every one of them — black or white— seemed to feel that she was
special."
"Man, if Malcolm lived in London, I'd keep close to him so that
I could console the sisters who'd soon find out that he is a religious
man and he doesn't fool around."
"Console them or prey on them? All right, don't answer that
particular question. . . . Looking atMalcolm while he was
surrounded by that bevy of beautiful women, it occurred to me that
the man West Indian.
uses space like a Maybe he got that from . . .
his mother? You know, West Indians carry a larger space around
them than Afro-Americans do, and they allow only the most
Jan Carew 15
intimate friends, paramours, or close relatives to invade it. Afro-

Americans seem to invade one another's space with the greatest of
ease. .Perhaps because they live in those American cities, the
. .
space that their African ancestors brought with them just shrank.
What Malcolm, a denizen of cities, still
a contradiction, though!
carrying a sense of space he inherited from his Grenadian mother.
... I don't know where he got his aristocracy of the spirit from
either. But he's got it. You can't buy that or borrow it or pretend to
have it, you've got to be born with it. Jesus Christ! but the man's
lonely, eh! When he was talking to Lizaveta, I thought I saw a look
of pain and bewilderment flash across his eyes. It was a look of
such sadness and longing that I felt a pang in my heart, and I
thought, That's him! That's the Malcolm that a lot of followers

and enemies alike never even catch a fleeting glimpse of!' I was sure
right then that he'd had his nights of crying."
"Crying? Malcolm? You must be joking, man!"

"We all have to have our night of crying. I remember having
mine Amsterdam. I was about to go to Brussels the next day. It
in
was wintertime, and I felt so blasted alone. I was always finding

myself in strange cities, with strange people, and only the women,
with their primordial understanding of how to humanize males of
any race, color, or creed, prevented me from drowning in a limbo
of madness. That night, I felt that I was at the end of my tether. I
cried all night long."
"Why the rass were you going to Brussels? Talk about a nomad,
man, you're the ultimate nomad!"
"Oh, I don't remember why I was going to Brussels. I was just
drifting. But that night I cried from deep inside me all night long.
Malcolm must've had his night of crying with his head on his wife's
bosom, or when he was alone in a hotel room, or during his Mecca
pilgrimage. Who knows?"
"There are folks out there who want to steal his life
—
"But there must be a part of him that wants to live; to see his
children grow up, and to be part of a movement that evolves and
—
matures that's what makes his secret nights of crying all the more
poignant."
16 GHOSTS I\ OUR BLOOD
"Rass, man, the next thing you'll be doing is getting into your
crystal ball act."
"OK, I'll come down to earth again. What concerns me about
Malcolm in this British arena is that, since his visits are so short,
whole areas of our reality as immigrants and slums-of-the-empire-
denizens are bound to elude him. Take the cultural scene in the —
midst of the snide, ugly, and stubborn British racism, there's still an
explosion of art, literature, music, lifestyle, cuisine from the
Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. You can't always see
it at a glance, but it's there burying itself into the flesh of Britain.
He'd need time to absorb and understand all of this. Although
Malcolm does have a mind like a giant clam that snaps up every
idea within its reach, he doesn't have enough time to understand
and analyze what's going on here. But he is a quick learner. I told
him that some of the Blacks here have a psychic impediment that
prevents them from acknowledging the links binding them to their
primary ancestral homelands, and because of this they become
mentally crippled by self-hatred. 'A psychic impediment,' he'd
repeated, moving his head from side to side and savoring the two
words as if they were something tasty. 'I like that term. I must
borrow it sometime.' If only he could buy more time! And he
could, if he wanted to."
"Man, it looks like friends and enemies alike are going to keep
cheating the Brother of time for reflection and a spell of lotus-
eating ease that everybody needs occasionally like the bread of
life."
"If those friends and enemies keep swirling around him long
enough, they'll create a whirlpool and drown him."
When we home, Lizaveta refused to wake up and I had to

arrived
carry her up two flights of stairs. Limp, fast asleep, and completely
relaxed, she seemed to weigh at least half a ton.
I Iti!?
TWO
He began to fulfill the destiny that was concealed in the
marrow of his bones.

— Popol Vuli
went Malcolm we
The next morning I to see at seven-thirty as
had agreed the night before. He was staying at the Mount

Royal Hotel off Marble Arch.
When I entered the room, I was surprised to find him stricken with
flu. A combination of a hectic and demanding round of activities
being deported from France as a "security threat," plagued by

reporters, hounded down by the curious and by devotees eager to
touch the flesh at every turn —plus the lousy English weather in late
February had conspired to pass a debilitating virus on to him. The

light filtering through pale blue curtains and the soft yellow lights
in the room gave his face a greenish pallor. I tried to disguise my

concern for his condition with an easy banter, and he in turn made an
effort to perk up and respond in a light and cheerful conversational
vein.
"You've got a nice view," I said as an opening gambit, "mews,

cobblestones, windows, and chimney pots."
"Oh, those things are 'mews.' Why do they call them that?" he
asked, springing the question on me. He had a restless, inquiring
mind that could take in an infinite number of details that might
17
have seemed trivial to others but were important to him as he fitted

them into the broader picture of British society. Besides, London
quite obviously fascinated him.
"In the old days," I explained, "the rich and powerful kept
falcons and had special quarters built for those highly prized birds
and their keepers. Falcons were more important than servants and
lackeys and our blackamoor ancestors who attended to them. The
"
falcons mewed. Hence 'mews.'
"We have cats in the States that mew—two-legged cats, and
mewing's part of their hustle," Malcolm said with a wide grin.
But this attempt at joviality obviously took a great effort. When

he moved into the light I could see that the whites of his eyes were
veined with red, and occasionally the lids looked as though they
were ready to fall at any moment. But valiantly he roused himself
from the torpor that the had induced. He knew that ahead of
flu
him were interviews and speaking engagements, and he liked to

tailor his talks to suit his audience. He was, therefore, anxious to
hear about life As our conversation progressed, he
in Britain.
summoned the energy to get up from his armchair and pace, slowly
at first and then, quite unconsciously, more quickly. And realizing
that he was wearing himself out, he'd stop abruptly, sit, and hug
himself as if he was feeling cold. I had brought herbal tea in a flask
and I drank a full cup before suggesting that he drink some.
"You should push liquids for that flu," I counseled.
"I'm OK," he said, barely managing a reassuring smile. I was
ready to leave at that juncture. I thought he should be left alone to
rest. But his eyes appealed to me to stay, and he added, "It's
nothing personal, my refusing the tea, but right now I don't think it
would stay in my stomach for long." Then changing the subject he

perked up and asked, "Tell me more about your paper. Why do
you call it Magnet?"
"We wanted the paper to attract people of color in Britain,
regardless of class or country of origin. There used to be a popular
penny dreadful magazine that had the same name, but our folks
know nothing about it. Most of them are fairly recent arrivals."
Malcolm, always quick to understand nuances, asked, "When
Jan Carew 19
you say 'people of color,' you mean Negroes, Indians, Pakistanis,
Chinese, everyone of color?"

"The English did us Malcolm. They've lumped us all
a favor,
—
together as 'niggers' Asians, Africans, West Indians, the lot. They
compel us to unite whether we like it or not. Of course, throughout
the empire, we had the same educational system inflicted on us and
so we carry much of the same cultural baggage that's bursting at
the seams with its Britishness. And just as important as the
language is the fact that we play the same games, like cricket,
soccer, rugby, and field hockey. So despite enormous cultural
differences, we can still communicate fairly easily with one an-
other."
"And I can forecast that since all you have, more or less, just
of
arrived," Malcolm said, "being able to talk the same language and
play the same games will help for a while. But later on, they'll play
the divide-and-conquer game on you, too. In the States, they do it
with the Indians, the Asians, the Latinos, and even the West
Indians." He looked at me with a quizzical smile and said, "Tell me
about this Dunbar guy. I him out."
really couldn't figure
"Yes, old Rudolph, hmm! I could tell last night that you found
him fascinating. He's a strange old bird, our Rudolph is. First he
sees himself as a Black aristocrat, and then he's absolutely con-
vinced that creative people like composers, artists, writers, etc., are
superior beings
—
"What about the Black ones?" Malcolm asked.
"He thinks that the Black ones like himself are more superior
than the others."
"That guy's really mixed up."
"He is. Rudolph's case history would've made better reading
than all those used by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White
Masks. The West Indies produced some types that are impossible
to label with glib, Black/whiteAmerican cliches. Rudolph's the son
of a Guyanese nanny who worked for an English governor and his
wife in Guyana. He grew up in a village that former slaves had
bought from their master. You see, some of the slave owners had
begun to pay wages to their slaves long before the emancipation act
20 GHOSTS I\ 01 R BLOOD
was passed. So when it was passed, the ex-slaves pooled their

savings and, as the story goes, took wheelbarrows full of money to
pay for plantations that planters, who were now broke, were only
too willing to sell to them."
"Sugar plantations?" Malcolm asked.
"Yes, when King Sugar fell from his throne, a lot of bankers and
investors and planters lost their shirts."
"I remember my mother talking about cane fields, and some-

thing about the smell of sugar when they were boiling the juice . . .
and how the village folk made moonshine. She was a West Indian,
from Grenada."
"Those sugarcane smells never leave you. Sometimes out of the
blue I remember them, too."
Malcolm brought me back to my Rudolph saga by asking, "So
how did Brother Rudolph get from his village to London?"
"While he was in elementary school, his mother paid for him to
take music lessons, and his music teacher soon discovered that he
was unusually gifted. He learned to play several instruments, but
ended up playing the clarinet in the local militia band. Then his
mother, with the help of friends and relatives, scraped up the
money to send him to study at a Paris conservatory. It was while he
was a student in Paris that the Associated Negro Press made him
their European correspondent. When World War II broke out,
Rudolph got a break to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra
in Albert Hail. He was also a war correspondent for the Associated
Negro Press, and as if this was not enough, he was one of the
founders of the League of Coloured Peoples, our British version of
your NAACP—
"Not my NAACP," Malcolm quipped.
"OK, the NAACP. May I continue?" I asked with mock defer-
ence, and he laughed and gestured with his hands that I should. "If
you had time, we could have visited Rudolph's apartment. It has all
kinds of interesting things in it, like some of Adolf Hitler's silver
service with the initials A.M. engraved on it

—
1
"You must be joking/

"
"As thev sav at home, 'Is the God's truth.'
Jan Carew 21
"Well how in the name of Allah—"

"According to Rudolph, he was the first Allied correspondent
allowed to bunker after the Soviets liberated it. His
visit Hitler's
blackness made him win special favors from the Soviet command-
ers. So he just collected some souvenirs from the bunker. He likes
to cook, and when I visit him, he always prepares a West Indian

bachelor's cook-up for me."
"Bachelor's cook-up?"
"It's a mixture of rice, split peas, coconut milk, beef, chicken,
shrimp, salted pig tails
—
He held up a hand to stop me in mid-sentence. "You'd have to
count me out of that pig tail bit
—
"Anyway, we use those monogrammed A.H. knives, forks, and
spoons to dispatch our Guyanese meal, and Rudolph always
chuckles and says, That old race-baiting bounder must be turning
"
over in his grave.'
"I'd have enjoyed the meal without the pork," Malcolm said,
and I could see that he was savoring the incongruous picture of

Hitler turning over in his grave while we ate a West Indian meal
using his silver service.
"There's more."
"Lay it on me. This is a tale to beat the band."
"After Berlin was divided into occupied zones, Rudolph per-
suaded American General Mark Clark to invite him to conduct the
Berlin Symphony Orchestra in its first concert after the fall of
Hitler. It's best to get Rudolph talking about his Berlin triumph
when he's in his cups. He
you a dramatic, blow-by-blow
gives
account of what happened, and you can actually see him, impecca-
bly tailored, Black and arrogant as hell, wielding his baton with
complete assurance before musicians who had only recently been
prostituting their art in the service of Hitler. He opened the concert
with the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' and then he deliberately included
works by Jewish composers."
"So what happened afterwards? Why was he performing like a
white man's trained dog at that reception?"
"It's the usual sad tale of so many Blacks with talent. They used
him, and then they cast him aside. That Berlin triumph and a
concert in Paris were the high points of his career as a gifted
maestro, an and a man. For decades now, he's been on a
activist,
downhill, self-destructive slide. The sight of Rudolph performing a

kind of poor man's Emperor Jones role makes me squirm inside,
too. But what the hell! Perhaps I'm not secure enough to deal with
something like this, that's too close for comfort. Maybe none of us
are.
Malcolm was silent, reflective, and withdrawn. He closed his

eyes and said almost to himself, "We've got our Rudolphs back
home. I know a few of them. It's not easy being tolerant with them.
But I'm learning."
I thought he'd open up now and resurrect things that were
buried deep in his psyche, but instead he said quietly, "You know
something, you talk with that West Indian accent that carries
echoes of my mother and her friends from home talking to one
another."
"Mine's a Guyanese accent. The Grenadian one is different.
You've got to be born in the region to be able to catch the different

accents. Every part of the Caribbean has its own variety of English.
My accent hasn't changed much over the years. Some of us,
though, spend so much time trying to shed our West Indian accents
that we end up emptying the content of our skulls, and we're left
brainless but with perfect British middle-class speech. The next
generation —the British-born Blacks— will be different. Their ac-
cents will be homegrown U.K. ones, and then we'll have genuine
British-speak in black, brown, and yellow face."
The Rudolph had obviously triggered a spate of disparate
story
but intimate memories, and, all of a sudden, Malcolm seemed to
peel off some of the protective layers and to peer into a troubled
past when he confessed, "I used to like to hear my mother talk
when I was growing up. After all the years she spent in Canada and
And, boy-oh-boy! When she
the States, she never lost that accent.
was angry she could shape the words like bullets and shoot them at
you." Looking straight ahead as though I were no longer there, he
added, "I hated seeing my mother working night and day like she
Jan Caren 23
did. After my father was murdered, she had nine mouths to feed,
and she had to do it all by herself. It's only now that I can
understand what a terrible life she lived. We all had to pitch in, but
she did most of the toiling night and day, day and night ... I
. . .
used to daydream that when I grew up I'd become a lawyer and

give her all the things she never had. And now I realize, too, that
seeing her slaving day after day, I began to hate the system that
made her life one of endless drudgery, so what I did was shut the
thought of my mother out of my mind, and lock it away." And
then, having revealed a glimpse of the tender recesses of his heart,
he suddenly turned, looked at me, and asked matter-of-factly,
"What was your mother like?"
"She was the youngest daughter of a village schoolmaster," I
said, knowing that while I talked about my mother he'd have time
to assuage the anguish that had aroused. "Her
remembering his
mother could've crossed the color and caste line if she wanted to. I
remember my mother telling me that when her mother visited
Georgetown without husband and children, everyone assumed
that she was a white woman and treated her with extra deference.
But when husband and children accompanied her, the reverse was
true— the same folks who'd deferred to her when she was alone
went out of their way to be rude, and she'd declare, 'If looks
could've killed, their malicious glances would've wiped my mother
"
off the face of the earth!'
"Funny how these stories are the same everywhere!" he said,
"My mother could've passed for white, too, and you should've
seen the evil looks the whites shot at her when she traveled with us.
And once she was with us, those rednecks thought she was prime
bait for their lechery. But she had a sharp tongue, and she could
make those lechers back off right away."
"Malcolm, they've quoted you as having said that you hate every
drop of white blood in your veins, that your grandmother was
raped by a white man."
"That was a political statement. That was the line Elijah
Muhammad laid down, and as one of his ministers, I echoed it.
That was when I was in a mental straitjacket. But I've broken out of
it and I'm no longer mouthing someone else's lines. I'm speaking

with my own voice now."
I wanted to pursue this question of how he perceived black/white
relations since his break with the Black Muslims, so playing devil's
advocate, I what do you say we take

asked, "But just for the hell of it,
this black/white issue to a logical conclusion? If every Negro of
mixed blood was a rape-child, then you would've needed millions

upon millions of white rapists to accomplish this grisly task of using
race to assert power. They'd have been so busy with those mass
rapes, they wouldn't have had time to oppress us, run plantations,
trade and scour the seas looking for more riches to plunder. And
what about our women? Didn't any of them fight back? Or is it that
we never hear about the Black women who fought back and about
the brothers who died fighting to defend them? And wasn't there, no
matter how occasional it was, a genuine love between some of those
interracial couples? And when our own men treated them badly,
didn't some of our women turn to men of another race who treated
them with more consideration? Look, I've got enough mixed blood
in my family to make the heads of racists spin. One relative of mine
who was an officer in the Royal Air Force was shot down over
Germany during World War II. The Germans captured him and
before he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, they asked him what
race he was. So he said to his Nazi interrogators, 'Since you're
specialists on so-called racial purity, you work it out: I'm a mixture
of African, Carib, Portuguese Jew, Highland Scot, German, yes, even
some German, Irish, and French.' The Germans solved the problem
"
by listing him as 'race unknown.'
Malcolm threw up his hands, laughing, and conceded, "OK,
you've made your point. But right now I see 'Black' and 'white' as
political and ideological terms. I probably have just as much mixed
blood as you do, but politically and ideologically we're both Black.
We've got to be. The white racists in America don't bother to
differentiate between shades of black, brown, or yellow they —
color us black regardless of skin tones. African brothers and
sisters, too, accept us as one of them when we take sides with them
in their liberation struggles. But when we act white, they call us

Jan Carew 25
white even if we're black as tar. In acting white, we're sending

signals to them that white is right, that being in the shadow of the
whites is better than standing side by side with Black folk in the
sunlight. It's a joke how the whites keep accusing me of calling

them devils. Well, while I was in Africa, a savvy Chinese ambassa-
dor told me that the Chinese man-in-the-street calls whites 'white
devils' and Blacks who act white 'black-white devils.' That's
ideology at the grassroots for you! And as for our women resisting,
I'm just beginning to explore that hidden subject, and I've still got
a long way to go. But beginning with those early memories of my
mother, and what I'm finding out is
I've started to dig deeper,
changing the way I see the world." After one of those meaningful
pauses that told me his restless mind was ranging across a host of
troubled thoughts, he continued, "I wonder how my life would've
turned out if I'd been born in the West Indies and my mother had
brought me here to Britain when I was thirteen."
Slumped in an armchair with shoulders hunched and arms
hugging his chest, he looked pale and vulnerable and defeated. And
I thought once again that the confident, charismatic Malcolm who
had come to the reception at the Commonwealth Institute last
night had been transformed by a flu virus and a bout of Hamletism
into a being full of doubt and self-pity. If only those who idolized
him or who denounced him as a prophet of violence could have
seen him now!
"Why thirteen?" I asked, intrigued.
"That's when I was farmed out to foster parents in Michigan. I'd
just finished the eighth grade. A white probate judge had manipu-
lated things so that he could steal our house and land and hand
them over to his relatives, and on top of that, having pushed my
mother until she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown from
overwork, this so-called white upholder of the law forced her to
sign herself into a mental hospital. None of us was old enough to
prevent the breakup and scattering of our family. Wilfred, my
oldest brother, was still in his teens," he said, removing his glasses,
closing his eyes for a moment, and pinching the bridge of his nose.
I waited for him to continue but when he didn't, I could see that his
26 GHOSTS IN OIR BLOOD
being wrenched away from a widowed mother and family and

handed over to foster parents by a venal judge and impersonal state
was perhaps one of the most painful occurrences of his life.
officials
"First of all, what you'd have needed to survive here in the

mother country was good parents, luck, solidarity with the West
Indian community plus those folks in the host community who
were sympathetic to our cause," I said.
—
"OK, let's say that I had a single parent a mother who was a
—
widow and that she was ambitious and determined to see that her
children got a solid education; and — as she would often say —that
we were 'well brought up and not just dragged up.'
'
I got into the swing of this make-believe scenario and asked,

"How many children? And what kind of background come did she
from in Grenada? Middle class? Lower middle
Worker? class?
Peasant? And how old would she have been? And did she grow up
in the country or in the city? All these things matter."
"Well, let's say she had one foot in the middle class and the other
in respectable poverty; that she grew up in the country until she
was tenand moved to the city; that she'd married my father when
she was nineteen, and he too had one foot in and the other out of
the middle class; that he had a good basic schooling and was handy
as a builder, a carpenter, a farmer, and an odd-job man; and that
by the time she was thirty-six she had seven children by him but
was widowed when he died in an accident." He paused and tilted
his head to one side thoughtfully. "Let's say, too, that she was an
orphan, and the folks who brought her up in Grenada hadn't
spared the rod and spoiled the child."
"OK, so she was a strict West Indian mother, like all respectable
mothers were in her time. Her strictness was her way of ensuring
that no matter what happened to her, her children would survive as
a family. The whole family, therefore, would have migrated
mother and seven children. But let's not jump the gun, because
your mother was almost certain to have had a relative or a close
friend who had already migrated to Britain."
"OK, an uncle, we had several uncles, and my mother named all
of her sons after them. I was named after an uncle who emigrated
Jan Carew 27
to Canada," he said, with an amused look in his eyes as he gently

stroked his beard.
"All right," I continued, "let's transfer this Uncle Malcolm to
Britain, and, true to tradition, he would've been a maternal uncle.
Some West and Carib ancestors before
Indians, like their African
them, still and aunts are the only true
believe that maternal uncles
blood relatives, since the mother's the only proven and verifiable
custodian of the family lineage. As for the father, well! One can
never be absolutely certain who the father is. So Uncle Malcolm
would've assured her that he'd meet her when the boat-train
arrived, and she and the children could stay with him. He would
even have helped her with the passage money. Once all of that was
settled, she'd have set out on a crowded, cockroach-ridden and
rat-infested Italian passenger ship. The owners of those ships made

a fortune running an Atlantic slave trade in reverse —ferrying
immigrants from the West Indies to Britain. Our folk came in
droves, lured by the promise of jobs and social welfare benefits,
both of which were in very short supply at home. So having
gathered together prized belongings, your mother would've
packed them in a stand-up family trunk that almost knocked you
down with the smell of mothballs when it was opened. There
would have been a hectic period of preparation when your mother
and sundry friends and neighbors made new outfits for the
travelers, the Singer machines humming late into the night. Then,
copying styles from pictures in made
magazines, they'd have
overcoats for everyone out of blankets.Your mama and her brood,
with a delegation of friends and neighbors seeing them off, would
then have set out on a long and cramped Atlantic crossing. They
would've been served stingy and indifferent meals, and when the
Atlantic began to heave and roll, a lot of that bad food would've
gone to the sharks following in the ship's wake. An important
lesson your mother would've learned on that voyage was this: West
Indians from distant places like British Honduras, Jamaica,
Guyana, and the Bahamas were more often than not easier to get
along with than fellow Grenadians. A kind of forced federation of
West Indians took place on those ships while the immigrants were
packed ten or more to a cabin. In spite of the cramped quarters,

though, your mother would've enjoyed a certain kind of freedom
that she'd never known at —freedom from gossip and the
home
malicious scrutiny of neighbors — and she'd have had time to
herself to think and relax while newfound 'aunts' helped to look
after her children asif they were their own. So mother and children
would've arrived in Genoa after a two-week-long voyage during

which new and lasting friendships were forged."
"Our folks have done a lot of migrating," Malcolm said rue-
fully. "Some of it was forced, but a whole lot of it was just moving
from place to place to stay alive." He leaned forward thoughtfully

and pressed a forefinger against his temple. This gesture, so
characteristic of him, always reminded me of the Dutch boy who'd
pushed his finger into a hole in the dike to hold back the sea.
"That finger of his," I told myself, "is holding back an avalanche
of secret thoughts, presentiments, forebodings, and ideas." I con-
tinued creating our make-believe scenario: "The Italian ship-
owners used Genoa because those rundown passenger vessels
wouldn't have passed inspection at an English port. And as for
mother and children, long after their feet had touched dry land,
they'd have felt as though they were standing still while the sky and
the earth were heaving aboveand below them. Then you and the
others would've been herded onto a train between a gauntlet of
carabinieriand curious onlookers. You see, the only other times in
which those gawking European onlookers had seen Black, brown,
and yellow folk in large numbers on their shores was when they
—
had come as soldiers, sailors, airmen in short, as cannon fodder
for the white man's wars. So those curious white spectators
would've stared and stared and felt somewhat relieved that these
—
invading black hordes folk from the British West Indies whom
President Roosevelt had referred to as 'two million headaches'
were not going to be someone else's."
their neighbors, but
When Malcolm's was aroused, he could listen with
interest his
whole being. His limbs would relax, but his eyes never left you for
a moment.
Jan Carew 29
"So we're in Genoa now. What next?" he asked, removing his

spectacles and leaning forward.
Encouraged by his attentiveness, I continued, "As that slow train
from Genoa pulled out, packages of food would've literally been
thrown at the travelers. And a host of Black folk, their faces pressed
against train windows, would've caught fleeting glimpses of Euro-
pean cities and countrysides rushing past them. And at night, they
would've seen galaxies of city lights, shining like millions of
firefliesand keeping the darkness at bay. What would've impressed
the immigrants most of all, though, was not the buildings, the
lights, the neat farms and fields and the fancy structures, but the
sight of white men and women working as porters, railway

—
workers, farmhands, and hucksters something they'd never be-
fore seen in their lives. You see, in the Caribbean, the British
it was a mortal sin for
proconsuls had tricked us into believing that
white people to soil Thousands of pictures,
their fair hands.
images, and a host of myths had bombarded our colonized minds
as soon as we left the cradle and started growing up, impressing
upon us that black, brown, or yellow skin color forever equals
manual labor and racial inferiority."
Malcolm furrowed his brow, and there was a slightly puzzled
expression on his face.
"As I told you before, my mother could've passed for white, but
she grew up with Caribs and Negroes, and she chose to be Black,
and a Garveyite," he repeated.
"In our Caribbean, your mother's the exception that proves the
rule," I said.
"How come?"
"In our neck of the woods, barriers of class and color were
sometimes quietly lowered. You could be black as the night is
black and still be regarded as a backraman if you had enough filthy

lucre."
"A backraman}"
"A person whose wealth and status whitens him or her," I
explained.
"You can buy your way up to the fringes of whiteness in the

U.S.A., but if you're Black, no matter how much money you have,
Brother, you still have to navigate your way around as if you were
in a minefield."
"If you're white and poor in our neck of the woods, on the other
hand, the colonial officialdom does a very deft switch and classifies
"
you as 'Other.'
" 'Other'?" Malcolm asked.
" 'Other' simply means that poor whites have been expelled
from the white race and shoved into the ranks of the Black, brown,
and yellow. Racial democracy at the bottom! Poverty neutralizing
whiteness. That's our Caribbean scene. And that's why Yankee
tourists are often impressed or in some cases horrified, depending
on the eye of the beholder, when they see the racially integrated
poor in the Caribbean and Latin American blond, blue-eyed —
men, women, and children wallowing freely at the bottom with
Black, brown, yellow, quadroon, octoroon, or what-have-you
folks."
Malcolm shook his up with his fist,
head and, propping his chin
declared, "In the U.S.A., the powers that be keep the poor whites
happy by telling them that they might be poor, dumb, and
backward, but an illiterate white sharecropper is still superior to a
Negro no matter how high and mighty this Negro might think he
is. The Negro could be a priest, a professor with a Ph.D., a
politician, or a Pullman porter, and it wouldn't make any differ-

ence." He laughed his boyish laugh and his eyes danced with an
impish delight as he sat back to enjoy his own joke. I noticed then
that sometimes, depending on his mood, he would let his arms
hang limply at his side and stretch his long legs in front of him. And
when he did this, you realized that he was one of those very tall
people whose limbs are afflicted with an adolescent awkwardness
all of their lives.
"Let's get back to the scene where my mother and her seven kids
are emigrating to Britain," he said.
I sat back and continued:
"The worst part of that Genoa-Calais-London trip —crossing
Jan Carew 31
the English Channel —was yet to come, man. After a night and a
day in coffined spaces on a slow train with locked doors and
windows, your mama, you, your brothers and sisters, along with
the other immigrants, would've finally been disgorged onto a
Channel steamer. This last phase of the journey had its own brand
of horrors waiting for you. At the height of the West Indian
immigrant onrush, the folks always seemed to arrive at the
Channel ports when squalls, rainstorms, and high winds, some-
times blowing with hurricane force, churned up mountainous seas.
But let's track back a bit and talk about how, at the beginning of
this final ordeal, those travelers from the sun would've felt the first
bite of cold when they left the train at Calais or Boulogne and
hurried to the third-class deck of the Channel steamer. The first

cold winds would've licked their noses, cheeks, and fingers like
frozen tongues and bitten them like cold, sharp teeth of iron, and
with every breath they took, they'd have felt as if they were
breathing in razor blades. Then, as soon as the ship got under way,
those winds would've begun to howl and moan like dogs grieving
for drowned owners; and the ship, plowing and shivering its way
through walls of water, would have made them feel as if they were
standing on a deck that could at any moment remove itself from
under them. Added to all this, the smells of bilge water, fresh paint,
stale food, and body odors sent stinking vapors to the brain and
unleashed a plague of seasickness. The folks would then begin to
retch and vomit were awash and
their guts out, until the decks
slippery with half-digested food and drink, bile, and stomach
juices. Those odors permeating the closed and crowded lounge
would become fetid, heavy, and unbearable and even when one of
the braver souls opened the door to rush on deck and lean over the
rails, the clean sea air would refuse to mingle with the odious
stench of that third-class limbo. So that journey to Britain

would've forced you and your family to relive the journey that
African ancestors had taken in the opposite direction centuries
ago.
"Your first stop in London would've been under the sooty
domes of Waterloo Station. Suddenly that station would be
festooned with Black faces —immigrants in tropical dress with

beach towels around necks and shoulders, babies wrapped in
everything that could be fished out of mothballed trunks, men and

women walking to rhythms that were born when their bare feet
had touched warm and welcoming surfaces. And the cold, often
bewildered stares of the British hosts would freeze them to the bone
more cruelly than the weather did. But on the fringes of the crowd
of newcomers would always be hustlers waiting to prey on lonely
and lost souls who had no one to meet them. But your Uncle
Malcolm would have been there with overcoats and blankets to
wrap around his never-see-come-to-see relatives and warm them
with the glow of his pleasure at seeing them. That's how you and
your family would've come to Britain, Brother-man, and once you
were crowded into his cramped quarters, old Uncle Malcolm
would've explained to your mama that she could apply for welfare
and, after the children were registered in schools, begin looking for
a job."
"She'd have hated living on welfare," Malcolm said emphati-
cally.
"Then she would've settled you, your brothers, and sisters in
schools very quickly and started work as a nurse's aide in a

hospital or as a worker in a factory. She, most likely, would've
been highly literate, but without certificates that they recognized in
the mother country, she would've been unable to get a clerical job.
Newfound friends would've persuaded her that a factory job was
her best bet; and someone would even have taken her to a factory
that hired West Indians. So working in a factory, she'd have
learned her first lessons in survival in a highly industrialized and
racist society."
"And what about schools?" Malcolm asked. "What kind of

school would I have gone to?"
"You'd have gone modern
to a secondary school. And as a tall
Black teenager, everywhere you went the police would have
stopped you and badgered you and goaded you into getting
arrested and charged. And if you were bright, racist teachers would
have done everything possible to make you feel dumb and inferior.
Jan Carew 33
And when you you of all people surely would have

protested, as
done, they'd have seen to it that you were shoved down to the
lowest rung of the achievement ladder so that you could join the
other so-called maladjusted colored students."
"Wouldn't have been any different from the U.S.A. then," he
said with a good-natured chuckle. But somehow this didn't suc-
ceed in dispelling the somber thoughts that our make-believe

scenario had inspired. For Black folk everywhere in the diaspora
like to believe that there must be a land somewhere over the
horizon where Black people can live without fear of discrimina-
tion, and I had just scratched Britain off the list.
But I could not end our make-believe scenario on a note of

despair, so I added, "After raging against the hurts inflicted upon
you by this racist society, you might also have become the leader
who could have united the Black community in Britain to fight for
its rights." He seemed to be lost in a reverie and did not comment,
and I continued, "Racism wears different masks in different places
at different times, but when the mask is torn away, the same
malevolent face of exploitation and greed is exposed."
"But your experience was different, wasn't it?" Malcolm asked
with an ironic smile, and when our eyes made four, his gaze was
direct and searching. He had lost interest in our make-believe
exercise and wanted to probe other complexities of Black life in
Britain. He was very shrewd and knew that the dismal immigration
scenario I had just painted for him was by no means the only one in
the drama of Black migration.
"Yes, my life was different," I acknowledged. "I was a middle-
class colonial Negro from Guyana. But what happened was that, like
Nkrumah, I had worked and studied in the United States before I

came here, and the racism in America tore off my mask. You see,
Black Americans taught me the kind of racial loyalty that we don't
have West Indies and Africa. Besides, the British are pretty
in the
clever at making you believe that since the white British male is the
most 'superior' being on earth, then some of that 'superiority' rubs
off on their Black, brown, and yellow lackeys, who in turn can claim
to be top dogs in the colonial-lackey limbo world of 'many dogs and
few bones.' The British have more experience than the Yanks in
finding the right boreholes into the minds of their colonial subjects.
The Yanks are cruder.They tell you that their white Anglo-Saxon
males are 'superior' and if you don't acknowledge it, they're ready to
club you to the ground, shoot you, tar and feather and lynch you,
deny you jobs, decent housing, and even medical attention if you're
bleeding to death and a Black doctor or a Black hospital isn't nearby.
It isn't that their racism doesn't have its own brand of subtleties and
warts or that their Negroes are a special breed, but Black Americans
had different challenges to face and their responses were different.
Slavery was abolished in the West Indies in 1832. It had ceased to be

profitable. Economics and slave resistance, not the eloquence of
abolitionists, brought it to an end. Meanwhile, in the United States,
cotton was king, and the planter class was wringing obscene profits
from the blood, sweat, and tears of slave labor, so slavery clung to
the South like a malignancy and it took the killing spree of a Civil
War to remove it —
"Are you a Marxist?" Malcolm broke in. He had a way of
springing unexpected questions.
"Aren't you?" I shot back.
"Answer my question and I'll answer yours," he countered.
"I'll answer by telling you a story. Recently, a countryman of
mine, a Black vicar of Bray, who looks like a weasel and acts like
one, went to an English lord and told him that I was a Communist;
and this English aristocrat laughed in his face and said, 'Which
self-respecting Black man wouldn't be a Communist?' That lord
himself told me about it. There are some white people who like to
tell you with malice about the quislings who come to lick their
boots."
"You still haven't answered my question," Malcolm said with a
quizzical twist to his mouth and a tilt of the head.
"I'm a socialist, a Pan-Africanist, a Black Marxist, a nationalist
who believes in the cultural unity of the Black world based on our
common resistance to white racism. And I'm an off again on again
atheist, because the secret and forbidden spirit world to which the
polyglot races and cultures in my village introduced me still lives in
Jan Carew 35
my imagination and my psyche and nourishes me when I write or

paint. I'm all of these things rolled into one
—
"You left out something," he said, cutting in again.
"What's that?"
"That you're married to an English woman, that you have three
English stepchildren
—
"And one of my own," I added.
"And one of your own," he repeated.
"But this 'married to a white woman' business is a peculiarly
American obsession."
"American and South African," he corrected. "But I found out
during my travels that it wasn't such a big deal to most folk."
"What?"
"I mean, peeping into bedrooms to find out the color of couples
in bed is a sick American pastime." He turned to me with a slight
air of embarrassment and asked, "How did you put it? Something
about Black and white conversation below the waist?"
"Ah, yes, I said that conversation below the waist is easier and
more pervasive in Britain and Europe, but I also said that it doesn't
make the slightest difference to the institutionalized racism in this
neck of the woods. Racism isn't resolved in bed no matter who's
sleeping with whom."
"I agree. It should be a personal and private affair, but when you
walk arm in arm out your front door, it becomes a political matter.
Besides, what about our Black women who are left on the shelf?"
"The chaps here say that while they're here they have to live off
the land, since they can't afford the fare to go searching for Black
women They say that no matter what color the wife is,
overseas.
cut off from a homeland forever the way they are, the woman they
—
share life with, who bears their children and hers she then —
becomes their country."
"The woman, white, brown, yellow, or black, is their 'country,'
that's a new one on me," Malcolm said, shaking his head and
creasing his brow in bewilderment.
I brought the conversation back to the subject of where he stood
on questions of socialism and Marxism. "I told you about my

potpourri of socialism, Marxism, etcetera, so what about you,

Malcolm?"
"I'm a Muslim and a revolutionary, and I'm learning more and
more about political theories as the months go by. The only
Marxist group in America that offered me a platform was the
Socialist Workers party. I respect them and they respect me. The
Communists have nixed me, gone out of the way to attack me . . .
that is, with the exception of the Cuban Communists. If a mixture

of nationalism and Marxism makes the Cubans fight the way they
do and makes the Vietnamese stand up so resolutely to the might of
America and its European and other lapdogs, then there must be
something to it. But my Organization of African American Unity is
based in Harlem and we've got to learn to creep before we walk,
and walk before we run." He paused and added, "But the chances
are that they will get me the way they got Lumumba before he
reached the running stage."
Malcolm had once again retreated deep within himself. I tried to
ignore my macabre fantasies of his being shot, blown to pieces with
a —
bomb, mangled in a car crash all of this before he had time to
explore the social and political theories that would give shape,
structure, and continuity to his OAAU. But how gentle he was
when he was pensive! And yet a part of him was forever alert. He
was a reincarnated Hareward-the-Wake-or- Watchful, I thought.
Hareward was an Anglo-Saxon freedom fighter about whom I'd
read in the Royal Reader when I was a boy. He had fought
valiantly against the Norman invaders. My colonial education had
taughtme much about English and European history but nothing
of my own, and so now I instinctively dipped into a complex
memory pool to match white heroes and heroines who had died
long ago with living Black ones, like Martin Luther King, Jr. This,
of course, was not the intention of my colonial educators. I was
meant to revere those white heroes and heroines, such as Hare-
ward, Boadicea, the leader of the Iceni or King Arthur of the
tribe,
Round Table. But when it came to heroes and heroines of color, I

was induced to admire quislings like Gunga Din and Malinche,
that Mexican Indian mistress of Cortes. From elementary school
^H
Jan Carew 37
onward, educators taught children of color in the empire to

identify with Richard the Lion-Hearted, John and Sebastian
Cabot, Martin Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, the
first English slave trader, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I, the Virgin
Queen who was no and Robin Hood and his
virgin, Clive of India,
—
merry men although not because Robin took from the rich and
gave to the poor, but because he was co-opted by the king and
became a knight and betrayed the partisans who had fought side by
side with him in Sherwood Forest. So Black children of the colonial
world identified with the victors and imagined themselves becom-
ing intrepid explorers, buccaneers, slave traders, missionaries, and
white "civilizers of savages." To compound the problem of aliena-
tion, the ultimate symbols of evil —
the bad man, the mindless
female, the half-breed, the savage — are always symbolized by
Negroes, Amerindians, coolies, and other Kiplingesque "lesser
breeds beyond the law."
But, somehow, I had always felt a sneaking sympathy for
Boadicea. She was the leader of a "tribe," and so, they dinned into
my head, were my African ancestors. I could not therefore envision
her being anything like the bigoted and nondescript wives and
daughters of the British proconsuls in Guyana. When I read of how
Suetonius Paulinus, the Roman general, had crushed the male and
female warriors who were fighting side by side under Boadicea's
command, I instinctively identified with the vanquished, not with
the victors. I tried to picture the dead Iceni men and women,
scattered like tacoubas across fields oftall grass and under verging
trees; and I pang of pity for the ones who surrendered the
felt a —
—
old folks, the women and children all of whom were rounded up
at spearpoint and herded together like animals to be shipped off
into slavery. As for the brave Boadicea, I was sure that she was left
with no choice but to commit suicide, shouting defiance at her
Roman enemies before she died.
"Would Malcolm ever have to follow in their footsteps?" I asked
myself, and my mind went blank, leaving the question unan-
swered.
Looking at him closely, I couldn't help thinking that away from
the limelight and in the privacy of this hotel room, he really needed a
friend. Although we'd only known each other a short time, I was sure
that he had come to trust me as far as he would have trusted anyone
under the circumstances. I also thought that during this spell of being
sick and vulnerable he wanted, more than anything else, not only to
be at ease but also to be able to trust someone, even for a short while.
However, an incident occurred that made it clear to me that because
he was being hounded by what my mother would have described in
her biblical language as "the powers and principalities," there was a

point beyond which Malcolm trusted no one.
Forgetting how he had refused the herbal tea I'd offered him
earlier and seeing that he was still fighting not to give in to the flu,
I him a Contac capsule from a bottle I always carried in my
offered
briefcase. Once again he thanked me politely, but this time he took
the capsule from me and put it on a bedside stand. I realized the
moment I handed it to him that it was not the wisest thing to have
done. But having set the capsule aside, he sat opposite me and
smiled in the friendliest possible fashion. For the rest of my visit,
though, that red and white capsule sat on the bedside stand,
catching my eye reprovingly every time I looked in its direction.
"I'm a marked man," he explained somberly. The smile had

faded from his and after a long and awkward silence he
lips,
continued, "They've marked me down for death. I'm living like a

man who's already dead."
Without warning, I sang out, "Let us sit upon the ground and tell
old stories of the death of kings!"
"Another one of your quotes," Malcolm said. "Man, your
head's a library full of quotes."
"This one came from nowhere," I confessed. "I wanted to
discuss something else with you, but this Shakespearean passage
just slipped out."
I ambiguous exchange any further because it

didn't pursue this
was obvious that he was eager to unburden himself of some of the
troubling concerns that were uppermost in his mind.
"They? Who's this 'they' hounding you down?" I asked trying to
Sffl£^
Jan Carew 39
push him closer to his "night of crying" so that he'd open up and
some of the pain might drain out of his heart.
"I used to think it was the Muslims, but more and more it's
dawning on me that the forces tracking me down are more
powerful than Elijah's hit men. After what happened in Egypt and
France I quit saying that it was the Muslims alone who were after
me," he said, looking away.
"Malcolm, in Guyana we call death's messenger Mantop, and
sometimes no matter how many assassins are out there trying to get
you, Mantop cuts his sly mongoose eye on them and lets you live
your full four score and ten years."

"You don't know the people who are after me. I know them, and
I know the people who are manipulating them. Nothing short of
my death will satisfy that combination. Did you read about how I
was nearly poisoned in Cairo?" he asked. When I shook my head
no, he recounted, "I was having dinner at the Nile Hilton with a
friend named Milton Henry and a group of others, when two
things happened simultaneously. I felt a pain in my stomach and, in
a flash, I realized that I'd seen the waiter who'd served me before.
He looked South American, and I'd seen him in New York. The
poison bit into me like teeth. It was strong stuff. They rushed me to
the hospital just in time to pump the stuff out of my stomach. The
doctor told Milton that there was a toxic substance in my food.
When the Egyptians who were with me looked for the waiter who
had served me, he had vanished. I know that our Muslims don't
have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network."
Before I could question him further, he changed the subject
abruptly. Perhaps the memory of this event was still too painful for
him to dwell on it for long.
"It seems incredible," he said, "but I actually visited a whole lot
of countries in Africa —Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zanzibar,
Tanganyika, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia. When I was grow-
ing up I never dreamed of doing this. There's something I noticed
everywhere I went on that continent, though —our African broth-
ers and sisters have eyes that look further than the color of your
skin,your eyes, or the kind of nap you have on your head. They
look straight into your heart. And what good manners they have!
Africans and Chinese are the most polite folk I've ever met. I guess
that on the way to America we had to dump some of those good
manners in the Atlantic ditch. If a slave master's calling you names,
shouting at you all the time, putting you in chains and whipping
you, then you get accustomed to aggression, not polite conversa-
tion. So after four hundred years the good manners of our
ancestors were bound to be watered down."

He got up with some effort and began to pace up and down
again.
"But tell me more about your paper," he asked, picking up the
broken thread of his earlier inquiry and holding up the copy of
Magnet that I'd given him the night before. "I've just seen this
issue."
"That's the only one so far. It's a weekly, and the next issue's
almost ready to go to press. Do you know, your entire debate at the
Oxford Union was never broadcast or published. Because of
American pressure, no doubt, they've buried it somewhere. I'll try
and get hold of it and publish every word of it in Magnet."
"They promised me copies of the tape and the film, but," he said
with a knowing smile, "looks like those tapes got lost in the mail."
"Does this kind of thing happen often?" I asked, knowing that it
did.
—
"Sometimes things get through. I suspect and, mind you, I have
—
no proof that there are brothers and sisters at the post office who
know my name, bypass the censors, and slip things through every
now and then. And talking about the Oxford Union, do you know
Tony Abrahams?"
"Yes, I know Tony well. He's got a kind of Jamaican facetiness
about him," I said. When Malcolm looked a bit bewildered, I
explained, "You call it 'feistiness' but in the West Indies, we say

'facetiness.'As president of the Oxford Union, Tony didn't mind
twisting the British lion's tail a bit when he invited you to take part
in the Oxford Union debate a few months ago."
Jan Carew 41
"He really stirred things up at Oxford, didn't he?" Malcolm said

with a wicked smile.
"Tony? No, the two of you did. He opened the door, and you
walked in and took over. But Tony wasn't the first West Indian
president of the Oxford Union. The first one was a Barbadian
named Cameron Tudor. He was elected president of the Union at
the height of World War II. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda
minister, who had some kind of sneaking reverence for Oxford,
denounced Tudor as 'a slave boy in Oxonian robes.' And that old
racist was on the verge of apoplexy as he cussed the British out for
being so 'decadent.' It is curious how the racism that Hitler and

Goebbels both preached and practiced was profoundly influenced
by colonial ideologues like the Englishman Austen Chamberlain
and the Frenchman Gobineau. Hitler read and lapped up their
racist ideas and these were spewed out in his Mein Kampf. Before
Chamberlain became colonial secretary at the beginning of the

twentieth century, British proconsuls posted to the Gold Coast
used to be encouraged to marry African women highborn —
women, of course, like the daughters of chiefs, princelings, and
obas. This encouraged the reluctant proconsuls to stay for long
periods, in spite of the fact that the Gold Coast was known as the
'white man's grave' because of yellow fever. I suspect that even
more than the yellow fever, those proconsuls drank too much
alcohol, dressed in the wrong kind of clothes, and ate the wrong
kind of food."
"Our southern crackers wrote that racist prohibition into law
from the start," he interjected.
"Ghanaian nationalists now say that Austen Chamberlain's
prohibitionwas a blessing in disguise, because the offspring of a
large Cape Coast and Accra mulatto elite would have blocked
independence for decades."
"House Negroes," Malcolm muttered.
"Yes, they would have been classical house Negroes."
—
"We have our fair share of them Creoles who imitate white
folks, and when the white folks look up and see mirror images of
themselves, they hate it and they take it out on those Creole

imitators with a special hatred," Malcolm said. Then he leaned
forward, and with one of his swift leaps to another topic he asked,
"Look, Jan, could you send me a book list? I'd like to read up on
some of the things you talk about. Send it to the address in New
York that I gave you."
"All right, but I'll also send you books from time to time," I
promised.
"I'd appreciate that, Jan, really appreciate it."
"Wasn't it you who started Muhammad Speaks}" I asked. He
seemed pleased that I'd touched on this topic and he answered
immediately.
"Yes, I convinced Elijah Muhammad that the paper was neces-
sary as a unifying tool and an educational tool. What do you think
of it?"
"You want my candid opinion?"
"Yes."
"Its coverage of Third World news is tremendous, and it took up
a cudgel for Black peoples in America and elsewhere in the Black
world as, perhaps, no other major Black journal has done before,
but I can't for the life or tail of the mumbo jumbo
of me make head
that Elijah Muhammad upon readers in every issue."
inflicts
"Don't be fooled," Malcolm warned. "It might look like

mumbo jumbo to you, but it's a language that his followers
understand. That's what makes him dangerous."
There was an awkward silence which I broke by saying, "You
wouldn't believe how Magnet came into being."
"Try me," he said, leaning forward and giving me his undivided
attention.
"It all started when three Jamaican brothers came to me and said
that they were about to start a paper for the Black people in Britain,
and they wanted me to edit it. They had grandiose ideas about the
kind of newspaper they wanted, but very little money. I'd just
finished my fourth novel and was no longer under contract to write

three TV plays a year
—
"You wrote plays for TV? How'd you come to be doing that?"
H
Jan Carew 43
"A television executive heard one of my plays on the BBC Third-

Programme and she offered me a contract to write three plays a
year for their idiot's lantern. But when my plays became more and
more radical, the BBC became less and less interested, so we parted
company."
"I'd like to see one of your plays sometime . . . but when will I
find the time?" Malcolm asked himself rhetorically. "But let's get
back to Magnet."
"Well, to cut a long story short, those three Jamaican Muske-
teers knew that no matter how much I hedged and hesitated at first,
I'd finally agree to edit the paper, and I did. But I was convinced
that if Magnet were to succeed, we had to establish a reputation for
being fearless, for telling the truth, and we also had to offer our
readers the very best of everything —the best layout, the best
writing, the best graphic arts, the best photographs, and the best
investigative reporting about the Black condition in Britain. In
short, because everything was being run on a shoestring, we had to
produce a first-rate paper that both served the community and
looked good. What happened Rudolph Dunbar
next is that old
knew a sympathetic English lord who owned the most modern
printing press in Europe
—
"An English lord? Am I hearing right?"
"Yes, the House of Lords, that house of the living dead, sports
an occasional maverick who breaks ranks with his peers. There's
even the odd Communist lord. The British ruling class is deft at
kicking troublemakers upstairs and suffocating them with honors.
Long ago, they even made Henry Morgan, one of the most
murderous of pirates, a 'sir' and appointed him governor of
Jamaica, and old Sir Henry ended up hanging several of his former
buddies."
"Kicking people upstairs just wouldn't work in America,"
Malcolm said.
"I suppose that right now, it wouldn't work there," I agreed, and
we both laughed before I added, "It would need an old, urbane,
and decadent society like this one to make the good old British
kicking-upstairs business work."
"We've got the decadent bit," Malcolm said.

"A cynical observer once quipped that America leaped from
barbarism to decadence without an intermediary period of civiliza-
tion," I said, and Malcolm, nodding agreement, declared, "The
enslavement of our African ancestors was the worst form of
barbarism known to mankind and after it was abolished, the
lynching of thousands of Negroes under the noses of those who
were supposed to be upholding the law only added hypocrisy to the
barbarism." Malcolm, having said this with a harsh edge to his
voice, smiled and, looking at me mockingly, added, "You think I
get too worked up about these things, don't you?"

"You're a new convert, Malcolm. You have fire in your belly.
The curious thing, though, is that the fire will never burn itself out
for as long as you live," I said, and as the mood in the room became
heavy and somber, I tried to dispel it by continuing my tale about
Magnet in a light and almost facetious vein.
"Anyway, we phoned his lordship, and he invited us to dinner.
During dinner at his club, we convinced him to have our paper
printed at his plant at rock-bottom cost. He agreed to this, adding
that ours was the smallest venture he'd ever bought into. Then, on
top of what we'd asked him to do, he instructed his public relations
office to do everything possible to help us, and he also gave the
same instructions to his technical staff at the plant. That's why the
publication of the first issue was announced on the BBC news and
why we had that array of VIPs at our reception at the Common-
wealth Institute."
Without looking up, Malcolm said soberly, "Jan, we're both
Black. We even look like blood relatives, but your world's very
different from mine. And yet ... I wouldn't exchange places
. . .
with you. Anyway, I couldn't. Could I?" He looked up with a slow

smile and added, "That's not to say I don't envy you."
"You know, Malcolm, Blake once wrote, The tigers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction.' You're one of the tigers of
wrath, and I, one of the horses of instruction."
"That's deep," he said, nodding approvingly, "I must remember
Jan Carew 45
that. This Blake fellah really hit a bull's-eye. The Scottish fellah at
the Oxford Union debate quoted him, too."
"McDiarmid," I said.
"Yeah, that's him. If only I had the time to read everything I should
read! Blake sounds interesting," he exclaimed and added with a
laugh, " Tigers of wrath,' huh! When did this Blake guy live?"
"In the mid seventeen and early eighteen hundreds."
"When was popping."
slavery
"But Blake was an enemy of slavery, and he wrote so passion-
ately about Black folk that, long afterwards, some of us, reading
him for the first time, believed that he had to be one of us."
"He was a white liberal then."
"He was a great artist, a poet, an engraver, a philosopher king, a
visionary," I said heatedly.
"All right, Jan." He laughed, stopped pacing up and down, put
a reassuring hand on my shoulder, and observed, "You get all
worked up about these bookish things, eh?"
"The Black activist part of me sometimes collides with the
creative part and sparks begin to fly inside my head," I confessed.
"Islam not only makes all the scattered pieces of my life fit, it
glues them together. So even though sparks still fly inside my head,
I can control them before they start fires."
"The sparks are necessary," I said, but he didn't hear me.

—
"Your head's full of quotes and books " he started saying, but
when I was about to interrupt he raised his hand and said,
mockingly, "Your colonial education."
Malcolm's travels had catapulted him into arenas where the

conventional American Black/white obsessions were no longer
trapping him in a vortex of rage and hatred. Freed from the
psychological entrapment of these pathologies, he had time to
review the events of his whole life. His mind, too, freed from Elijah
Muhammad's Manichean doctrines, was opening like a desert
flower after the rains. was now open to new ideas, prepared to
It
explore new intellectual vistas. Paradoxically, when he was an

outlaw and a criminal in New York and Boston, the time and space
he had carved out for himself won for him an outlaw's freedom.
For compared to the "straight" world, the world of crime was truly
an equal opportunity one, with its own codes for interracial
mingling andits own very different prejudices and taboos. While
American majority embraced racist ideas and practices as

the white
though they were biblical canons, in the underworld race and
ethnicity mattered only when turf was being apportioned and the
different fiefdoms of crime allocated. In that world, women
Black, white, brown, or yellow —were regarded more as sexual
playthings, and a Black man sporting a white woman on his arm
would merely be proclaiming that he was one of the top dogs in the
hierarchy of crime. The woman in that aberrant culture, therefore,
was not a person, but a creature for pleasure. As such, she could be
exploited and cast aside, and her color was irrelevant.
Malcolm's freewheeling, dangerous, but exciting life as an
outlaw ended with a draconian prison sentence, and itwas in the
solitude of a prison cell that the early teachings of his mother and
father began to reassert themselves. His mother, hearing about his
jail sentence, had asked his brother Wilfred to tell him and this —
was before he became a Black Muslim convert that "Now that —
this has happened, Malcolm boy, don't serve time, let the time
serve you!" Those words linked him to a host of childhood

admonitions that contained enduring moral lessons from which he
could never escape again. So prison became a University of Hunger
for him, and he did make the time he spent there serve him well.
The next phase, that of becoming a Black Muslim and spending
twelve years as an idolator at the beck and call of Elijah Muham-
mad, was one that he regretted bitterly after he discovered what he
called "the Messenger's religious fakery and immorality." It was,
however, more than anything else, what he had believed that Elijah
Muhammad stood for that attracted him to the man and his
movement. When he found out that the Messenger was not
practicing what he preached, he felt compelled to expose him and
to break with his movement.
"That was a period," he informed me with a naive vehemence,
Jan Carew 47
"when I rinsed my brain out with fresh water and began to

restructure my life. I began to see more clearly than ever that when
I went fishing for souls long since abandoned by society, I had to
set an example —
no drinking, no smoking, no fooling around with
women. In short, I had to match my actions with beliefs. Fakery
and immorality might work for a while, but when you're found
out, your movement dies."
In Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and in Britain, however,
Malcolm was confronted with an array of new complexities in race
relations. Meeting Black and brown heads of state in Third World
countries he could, for the first time in his life, catch illuminating
glimpses of societies from the top looking down, societies in which
the rulers and the ruled were the same color and also societies in
which the levers controlling the productive forces in so-called
independent societies were still firmly in the grip of invisible white
imperialist hands. He was also beginning to discern, after the
euphoria of seeing "Black people in charge of their own destiny,"
that some of those and the cliques around them, in the midst
rulers
of trumpeting anticolonial slogans and condemning racism, were
actively collaborating with the enemy and showing more contempt
for their own people than the white proconsuls had done before
them. In his encounters with prime ministers, presidents, and
hereditary rulers, he had begun to forge new intellectual tools with
which to probe some of the complex workings of different social,
political, economic, and psychological forces that he encountered
on his travels. He was beginning to see clearly that in newly

independent countries, questions of economic power assumed a
paramountcy over those of race. This was particularly evident
where the Black/white color codes of settler societies no longer
applied. During this period of what Paulo Freire termed "de-
schooling," Malcolm realized that the sons and daughters of the
African diaspora who had been internationalized by the most
brutal population displacement in recorded history had also been
ghettoized physically and psychologically, wherever they'd been
transplanted. And, as he described it, "First they stole us from
Africa, and then they tried to steal Africa from us."
"You said that you're an on again, off again atheist earlier on,
didn't you?" Malcolm asked suddenly, and, taken aback, I paused
before answering somewhat guardedly, "I'm somewhere between
being an agnostic and an atheist and a denizen of the African and
Amerindian spirit worlds." He kept his eyes fixed on me, and I
knew that I had to answer his question more fully.
"I was never allowed to see myself as an individual when I was

growing up," I explained. "The village folk would always intro-
duce me by saying, 'This is Ethel Carew's boy, his grandfather was
Schoolmaster Robertson, and Louisa Hintzen was his grand-
mother on his mother's side.' You
grew up in a matriarchy.
see, I
This was not true of my village as a whole but it was certainly true
—
about my extended family the women ruled and they almost
invariably outlived the men. The womb of a mother was regarded
as the only certain place from which an authentic blood line could
be traced. So I grew up convinced that my maternal grandparents,
uncles, aunts, great aunts and great uncles, and their broods were
my closest relatives. It was impossible for me to see myself as an
individual. I even had a female ancestral spirit protector. My
mother would say to me over and over again, 'Your grandmother's
spirit is protecting you' or 'Your grandmother's spirit will always
look out for your interests
" — '
Malcolm laughed out loud.

"Spirit protectors?" he asked, "My spirit protector is Allah."
"But you need intermediaries, don't you? Elijah Muhammad
was one for a while, but thereno substitute for that of a blood
is
relative who has already passed on to the Spirit World. That's what
my village folk believe. That's the
—
"And what about you? Do you believe it?"
"When had malaria as a child, night after night in my dreams
I
I'd seen the grandmother who'd died before I was born. She'd be
sitting at the foot of my bed. When I would tell my Hindu nurse
about this dream, she'd say, 'Don't worry, it's your grandmother
"
looking after you.'
"You'd get along well with my mother," he said with a cryptic
Jan Carew 49
smile. "She always believed in all this West Indian stuff about
spirits and dreams and things supernatural."
He shifted restlessly in his chair, obviously feeling uncomfort-
able. I felt, however, that if Malcolm could take the business of his
ancestral links more seriously, then he would no longer see himself
as a lonely, beleaguered figure surrounded by enemies and idola-
tors and trustingno one.
"Who would you choose to be a spirit protector?" I asked. He
tapped his forehead with his long fingers, and then he replied
haltingly, "I suppose . . . my father . . . my mother's locked away in
her own world."
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he ever really tried to
enter her world, but this was so personal and presumptuous that I
desisted and shifted the conversation to my own experiences

instead.
"My village, with its bewildering variety of cultures, taught me
from childhood onwards to respect the occult and the supernatu-
ral. I took it for granted that I was part of an extended family
which, in turn, had visceral connections with ancestral spirits and

ancestral memories. My village was a deep, fathomless reservoir of
human dreams, fears, fantasies, passions, and mysteries. Before I
left for my wanderings abroad, I had scooped up enough from the
reservoir to last me for several lifetimes. That's why I can travel
anywhere in the world and feel secure within myself. When I read
Hamlet's observation to his friend Horatio that 'there are more
things in heaven and earth . . . Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy,' I remember thinking to myself that I'd already known
and accepted this as a fact of life since I was a child.
"As I said before, in our culture you are defined by who your
ancestors were, starting from your grandparents and great-
grandparents. Once that is done, then you can deal with specific
religious and other questions. So, in following tradition, I can best
tellyou about myself by starting with my grandparents. My
paternal grandfatherwas a successful smuggler and a kind of Black
buccaneer. Captaining a two-masted schooner, he traded contra-
band between the Caribbean islands and South America. My

mother's father was a village schoolmaster and an African nation-
alist. His mother —
my great-gran believed in the Yoruba —
Orishas, and she always converted a room in her houses into a
shrine. Both grandfathers were married to tall, handsome, and
fiercely independent women. My father was a Catholic, my
mother, a Wesleyan Methodist. I first went to a Jesuit school, but
my mother plucked me out of it when I told her I wanted to be a
priest. She then Protestant-ized me by sending me to a Scottish
Presbyterian high school run by Canadian missionaries. I was a
passionate Christian believer at sixteen, but at seventeen I discov-
ered Voltaire's writings in my grandfather's library. I still remem-
ber how that rebellious Frenchman riveted me to the ground with
his opening salvo against the Catholic church, when he wrote that
was the first knave who met the first fool.'
'
'the first priest
"Voltaire, huh?" Malcolm declared, writing the name down in

his diary, as he had been doing now and then during our talk. "Is
that t-e-a-rV"
"No, t-a-i-r-er
"You speak French?"
"Reasonably well. I started learning it in high school, and then I
studied in Paris."
"Where haven't you been, man! I wish I could speak foreign
languages. I felt like a fool in Guinea and Morocco, and in Egypt
and Mecca. I always had to have an interpreter at my elbow. It was

like talking into emptiness all the time. I've started studying Arabic
and French."
"Heavens above!" I thought. "If they'd only allow him the time
to live and breathe. He'd learn so much and do so much with what
he learned!"
Malcolm returned to the subject of religion, saying with a
chuckle, "We have knaves —Black and white ones— telling Black
fools to turn the other cheek, to sing and pray, promising us that
once we get to heaven, there'll be treasures waiting for us there.
Meanwhile, the white man steals all the treasures here on earth.
These preachers tell lies to their congregations, and they tell lies to
Jan Carew 51
Allah. Knaves and fools! Knaves and fools!" He repeated the

words and laughed out loud before confessing, "At seventeen, I
wouldn't have known if Voltaire was the brand name of a canned
soup or a writer. I only became hooked on reading when I was in
prison. Knaves and fools!" he muttered once more. "That's
Christianity for you!"
"But Christians haven't cornered the market on knaves and
fools," I pointed out. "There's old Elijah Muhammad and the
Black Muslims, and you were a part of their closed, mentally
closeted circle."
I didn't know if he would take me up on this challenge, since I
might have touched a sore spot, but he sat back in his chair, looked
at the ceiling, and admitted, "I know now that there are knaves and
fools in many religions and for twelve years, an important section
of my mind was shut tight. It's dangerous to put any human being
on such a high pedestal that all his faults are out of sight. I did this
with Elijah Muhammad. He was the knave and I was the fool, and
I can't you what a big fool I was! For a while, I sincerely
tell
believed that he was a divine being. I made myself believe it. I

refused to see all the warts even when they were right in front of
me. When I found out that Elijah was having sex with his young
secretaries and that four of them were pregnant, I was stunned!
You know, that wouldn't have happened if I'd been listening to the
little voices in my head telling me that all was not well in the house
of the so-called Messenger."

A quotation from one of my Berbice High School history lessons
flashed acrossmy mind. I remembered Cardinal Wolsey lamenting,
"Had I but served my God with half the zeal with which I had
served my king, he would not in my old age have left me naked to
my enemies."
"Well," I thought, "Malcolm's only thirty-nine, at least three
decades away from old age, but his lament is just as anguished and
poignant as the cardinal's."
All of a sudden Malcolm sat up and said once again, "No one
can ever imagine how absolute my belief in Elijah Muhammad and
his Black Muslim movement was, and now he's after me like a
bloodhound. It's crystal-clear in my mind why I broke with his

movement and with him. He was acting as a tranquilizer instead of
wake up and resist their oppressors, and
mobilizing our folks to
any tranquilizing movement, no matter who's at the head of it, is
only postponing the day of reckoning."

what you're going to tell our folks here in Britain?"
"Is that
"I'm going to tell them to organize, protect themselves, don't
wait until the whites start lynching, burning, terrorizing them, and
finally sending them to the ovens, because until they learn to
protect themselves, the law won't do it for them, and the police
won't do it for them, and the good white citizens and many Black
ones will stand aside and look on without a murmur of protest, and
their silence will kill as effectively as the guns the racists use against
us. It's our destiny as an African people to fight for civil rights and
human rights."
And I mused silently, "Why can't they acknowledge that he's
changed? That at the heart of what he is now espousing is a
devastating critique of the conventional Black politics of tranquili-
zation and stasis? Gandhi, paraphrasing Thoreau, who was one of
his Western spiritual mentors, once said that absolute consistency
was the hallmark of a small mind,and Malcolm's mind was one
with an unlimited capacity for absorbing new ideas. That is why he
has now decided to 'join forces with whomever and whatever
benefits all peoples.' Why aren't they talking about his new goals
and the fact that he has changed his worldview? His concepts of
race and class and his political, social, and economic theories have
moved outside the narrow confines of his former religious beliefs.
And now he is working to wean his followers away from the
Black/white gridlock of perpetual racial antagonisms."
Malcolm came out of his long reverie to declare: "It's as if we're
on a perpetual journey on a slave ship, and when the slaves get
noisy and violent and threaten to tear the whole ship apart, the
white captain sends a delegation down below to negotiate with the
so-called ringleaders. The guys they send down have been dealing
with Negroes for a long time, and they know how to size them up.
So, as they talk to them, they make mental notes and separate the
Jan Carew 53
few who can't be bought or broken from the ones who can be, and
they open the hatch, invite them come on deck where there's
all to
air to breathe and sunlight to warm them. Once they're on deck,
the hatch is battened down again. The ones who can't be bought or
broken are quietly taken aside and thrown to the sharks. The
others know what's going on, but they pretend it's not happening
because they're in cahoots with the whites who are getting rid of
troublesome Black leaders. So those chosen ones are fed well, and
then they're dressed up and encouraged to strut around like
roosters. When the folks down below become impatient and begin
to create a racket, those bought-and-paid-for misleaders open the
hatch a little and shout down to them, 'Brothers and sisters, be
patient! Here we are negotiating with these white folk, while you're
making things difficult for us by acting so uncivilized!' Then they
go back to living high on the hog until the next blowup threatens.
And when those misleaders can't keep the rebellious brothers and
sisters quiet any longer, the whites get rid of them and another
delegation goes below deck and brings up a new batch."

"When will it end, Malcolm?" I asked ruefully.
"When everyone comes on deck and seizes the ship with the help
of some of the white sailors who hated the job they were doing and
who realized that when Black folks were liberating themselves,
they were also liberating them from having to be oppressors. At
that stage of liberation, too, those who follow can from then
onwards keep an eye on their leaders night and day to make sure
and action are in proper alignment."
that talk
132
THREE
My commitment to our struggle recognizes neither
boundaries nor limits: only those of us who carry our
cause in our hearts are willing to run the risks.
—Rigoberta Menchii
When you start thinking for yourselves you frighten
them.
—Malcolm X
After meeting Malcolm, I realized more clearly than ever that as

a Black man in a white-dominated world, having abandoned
that uneasy psychological no-man's-land between an ebony tower
and the reality of a stultified and oppressive colonial society, I too
had been subjected to a mind-wrenching, psychological tug-of-
war, pulled by opposing beliefs, ideas, and nostrums of self-
deception. My friendly encounters with this extraordinary Black

leader made me more certain than ever that the true history of
many oppressed people's collective pain, sorrow, and triumph
only a small part of which is recorded — is yet to speak with the
same measured cadences of truth and compassion to black, brown,
yellow, and white ears alike. Thatis why, over the years, I could see
with absolute clarity that socialism was the only system through
which our true histories could be told. "What kind of socialism?"
55
everyone immediately leaps into the fray and asks, and my answer
is, a humane and resilient socialism that is sensitive to the rhythms
of life and to all human needs —material, cultural, psychological,
and individual. Above all, it must be a patient
spiritual, collective,
and tolerant socialism. "But that is more socialism as a religion

than socialism as a political ideology!" derisory voices shout at me,
and I reply, "If it is, then so be it! Dostoyevsky, voicing one of his
inspired and prophetic insights, once said that should the Russian
masses embrace communism, it would succeed only if they turned
it into a religion. The Russian masses did embrace communism, for
a moment in history, but when religion was brutally suppressed

and a parasitic bureaucracy with a lamentable absence of imagina-
tion tried to foist its own gods, saints, and devils onto that society
for three-quarters of a century, it collapsed. This collapse brings
another Dostoyevskian adage to mind: if God does not exist, then
life becomes a carnival of devils.
During a lull in our conversation I thought, "Malcolm escaped

from his carnival of devils and embraced the God of the Muslims
only to find himself on a doomsday roller coaster, and now he's
refusing to slow it down and jump off." After brooding over this
melancholy thought for a while, I turned to him and said, "My

great-gran Belle didn't approve of the Jesuit belief that martyrs
become more alive in the minds of their flocks after their deaths.
Her contention was that once you're safely dead, folks invent an
entirely different persona for you —
an idolized version that's as
different from the real you as an Eskimo is from a Zulu. She felt
that leaders must live long enough for their followers to remember
how they evolved and changed and matured with time. When you
die prematurely, she says, followers only have fragments to remem-
ber."
"You're on that subject again? I know you mean well, but what
else is there to tell you? Yes, there's a death sentence hanging over
my head
—
"And you've chosen to rush headlong into Mantop's arms?
There must be another way."
Jan Carew 57
"As I told you before, the Muslims say, 'It is written.' " He was
smiling, but his eyes were sad, reflective, and inward-looking.
I launched into reminiscences about my great-gran once more to
counter his fatalism.
"My great-gran Belle used to tell me that there are ghosts in our
blood, and that we're lucky because the lowliest, the ones who
suffer most in the world of the living, are always top dogs in the
spirit world. So African and Amerindian spirits rule that spirit
world. And those ancestral spirits whisper warnings, whenever

we're about to do something reckless or foolhardy. Right now they
should be whispering to you that, perhaps, surviving for our cause
is more important than dying for it."
"The spirit world's fine, but I want our folk to be free in the
world of the living
—
I pretended that I hadn't heard him and continued: "When I was
a small boy of seven my mother moved me to a new school, and the
first day, a group of bullies began calling me names and cursing my
mother. Well, I stood up to them, and they beat the hell out of me.
Later on, while my was daubing iodine on my
great-gran Belle
bruises, she told me, 'It's the Carib blood in us that makes us want
to fight to the death. But where are the Caribs now? Gone!
Vanished! Next time those children taunt and bully you, use your
brain, boy! Run, but keep encouraging them to chase you. Once
you reach your yard, grab your slingshot, sic the dogs on them, and
attack.' She'd then insert her favorite ending to this advice by
declaring, 'The Almighty gave everyone a home spot, a sanctuary
spot, on this God's earth, but in His infinite wisdom He gave us
—
two Africa and Guyana.' Malcolm, you also have two Africa —
—
and America so there's no excuse for rushing to meet Mantop.
Let him come looking for you after you've lived out your full
fourscore and ten years."
Ignoring the pointed suggestion at the end of my story, Malcolm
said, "So, I've got ghosts of Africans, Caribs, and Allah alone
knows who else swimming in my blood, huh, Jan? That's some-
thing new." And he added with an excess of joviality while he
laughed his wide-mouthed laugh until crow's feet webbed the

corners of his eyes: "I have enough problems with the living.
Besides, aren't ghosts supposed to be white like the Klan in robes?
Check it out —when nighttime comes, black and white ghosts are
integrated. So, some of our brothers and sisters with crossover
dreams can look forward to ghost time, since it's the only time that
integration worked in America so far."
We both laughed, but he enjoyed his own joke much more than
I did. Malcolm then resumed his pacing for a while and cleaned his
rimless glasses absentmindedly before saying, "I wonder where my
secret spot, my sanctuary spot, is. Africa? America? Grenada?
Mecca?"
I posed the question directly to him once again, "Malcolm, why
don't you go back to one of those friendly countries you just visited
until things cool down a bit?"
"You sound like my brother Wilfred," he said, with a sardonic
smile.
"Well, why don't you?" I insisted.
"I could never do that," he said quietly.
"My great-gran Belle— " I began to say, but he interrupted me.
"Look, Jan, if I go into exile, it would turn out to be a case of out
of sight, out of mind."
"Yes, that's a possibility, but your image is already looming so
large in people's imaginations, and your words have already burnt

themselves into people's brains, and nothing your enemies do can
erase this. If you go into exile, those enemies will certainly pull out
every dirty trick in their repertoire to try and discredit you. But
with your austere lifestyle and your kind of unassailable integrity,
they'd have to fabricate slanders, and in the long run these would
backfire and make them out to be liars —
"It won't make any difference," he said wearily.
"What?"
"Exile."
"But and think and disseminate all kinds
you'll be able to write
of incendiary ideas like Marti did, and Lenin did. The pen's still
mightier than the sword. What about the electronic weapons in
Jan Carew 59
your arsenal? You could record speeches and your followers could
distribute the tapes
—
"I couldn't live like a fugitive. They'll never stop putting
contracts out on me," he said with a chilling certainty, and I
thought:
"But things will change . . . attitudes will change. Talleyrand,
that wily old fox of a French statesman, one said that treason is a
matter of timing. Your incendiary ideas will look normal in a
couple of decades." I had spoken with such urgency and passion
that I didn't even know I'd raised my voice. Malcolm paused in his
pacing and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder for a moment.
When I had cooled down, I thought:
"All too often, I'd heard the heroic rhetoric of transatlantic,
drawing-room revolutionaries, and then I'd seen those hot gospel-
ers of revolution return home and settle into a mute, neocolonial
opulence. Would Malcolm be any different?" I asked myself,
"Maybe, he's afraid that he, too, might succumb?"
For a moment, his calm and inexorable decision terrified me. I
knew that I might have made a similar choice in the heat of the
moment, but once I had time to reflect, I'd have mulled over a wide
range of options and ended up taking a less heroic way out.
I said to myself, "He's choosing martyrdom, but there must be
other honorable choices. He shouldn't be left to make this choice
alone. When will our people learn how to keep irreplaceable

leaders alive? Why must millions of us remain impotent onlookers
while others decide whether our leaders should live or die?"
The easy familiarity that had developed between us soon reas-
serted itself, but we were both profoundly aware that the issue we
had just discussed would surface again and again until it was
resolved one way or the other.
Taking occasional sips of water from a tall glass, he said, "What
—
do you Guyanese call death 'Mantop'? Well, ole Mantop didn't
get me in Cairo, but that doesn't alter the fact that I'm never going
to die of old age."
There was something serene on the surface about Malcolm's
acceptance of his imminent assassination, but I sensed that under-
neath his apparent serenity were feelings of despair and frustra-

tion, anxieties about the fate of his wife and children, concern
about the future of his OAAU, and a fierce desire to live. He broke
into my morbid ruminations, saying, "I'm sorry I'm not many
people in one —one of them could have spent the time patiently
building up movement that had many heads so that
a they if
decapitated one or two or there'd be others to carry on

three,
—
"A hydra-headed Black movement," I said, ending the sentence
for him with a suggestion of my own.
"I like that," he said, nodding "Many black
his approval.
mamba heads raised to strike. They told me that black mambas
make our rattlers look friendly by comparison. Any one of those
hydra heads would have been able to detach itself and travel
anywhere in the world spreading the message. The others could
have been stay-at-home heads doing the nitty-gritty things that
make a movement As matters stand now, if anything
strong.
happens to me. ..." His voice trailed off and he gestured with his
expressive hands. The extraordinary thing about Malcolm was
that he could criticize himself with the same ruthlessness, the same
intellectual honesty, with which he criticized his opponents.
He could switch from one topic to another with an ease that
startled and bewildered me. Besides, right at that moment, he
seemed to be in the grip of an impulse to spill as much as possible
out of his mind in the shortest possible time. He admitted half-
jokingly, "My system of dealing with people is this: I give everyone
zero, watch and wait as they earn their marks."
and then I
"So you hardly trust anyone? What about me? Haven't I earned
any marks?"
"Do you think I would have spent so much time with someone
who hadn't moved from zero?"
"You've been talking to me for two days."
"This business of trusting people carries risks, doesn't it? The
strange thing is that the more people I trust, the more it seems have
betrayed me. Just the other day, something happened, and it made
me stop and think —who was it that said you should trust all men
but none too much?"

Jan Carew 61
"Kipling, in his poem 'If.' "

He looked at me and smiled.
"My colonial education," I explained, and he bowed with mock
deference.
"Brainwashing," he taunted me, good-naturedly.
"And it worked," I confessed.
"Only partially," he conceded with a grin.
"Deschooling got rid of a lot of it, but I'll still have to take great
dollops of it to my grave."
He ended this interlude of banter by pacing back and forth. Then
pausing in the middle of the room, he said:
"One saw the OAAU doing from the very
of the things that I
start was collecting the names of all the people of African descent
who have professional skills, no matter where they are. Then we

could have a central register that we could share with independent
countries in Africa and elsewhere. Do you know, I started collect-
ing names, and then I gave the list to someone who I thought was a
trusted friend, but both this so-called friend and the list disap-
peared. So I've got to start all over again."
I caught a glimpse of a terrible uncertainty in his eyes as he told this
story, and to assuage his anguish over this Black-on-Black betrayal, I
reminded him that during the Haitian revolution, the only person
that Toussaint L'Ouverture could trust implicitly was Age, a white
Jacobin who was his chief of staff. "Age hated the bigoted French
planters almost as much as Dessalines did," I told him.
"Don't worry," he said, with a broad smile, "I might not have a
white chief of staff. But I'll work with everyone who believes in my
cause."
"Really?" I said, looking up at him with mock disbelief, but his
rejoinder was a serious one.
"Yes. But I've got to go about building a movement carefully.
The last thing an Egyptian friend said to me when we were parting
is that I should never get too far ahead of my followers, because if
I'm so far ahead that I'm out of sight, they might turn back. I don't
want that to happen."
Sitting down directly opposite me, he confessed, "The first time
Isaw you, I thought that I was looking in a mirror and seeing the
West Indian part of me that I know so little about."
"My great-gran Belle used to say that we're blessed with the
blood of the most persecuted folks on earth —Africans, Caribs,
Portuguese Jews, French convicts from Devil's Island, Highland
Scots, and only the Lord alone knows what else — so whenever we
cut ourselves, we can see the ghosts of those others peeping out
from among the African and Amerindian blood seeds. The ghosts
are always there talking their conflicting talk until there's a tower
of Babel inside your head. So we've got to listen well and search out
the kindest, the strongest, the most human of those voices and
make them our own, and that's where the African and Amerindian
part of us takes over."
"You're lucky," Malcolm said quietly, "you had a great-
grandmother who linked you directly with your African past."
"She died when I was twelve," I explained, "and at that time she
was well over a hundred. Nobody ever saw her birth certificate, but
my grandfather, the schoolmaster, said that she was a hundred and
sixteen when she went to meet her Maker."
"You're lucky," Malcolm repeated. "In America, Black folks are
mostly a people without a past. I always wanted to find out more
about my mother's Grenadian family, for example. I know about
my father's family, but I know very little about hers. I'm always
promising myself that I'll sit down with her and let her tell me
everything she can remember about her family. Perhaps I'll do that
when return
I home. Last time I saw her, her mind was clear as a
bell." He paused and added reflectively, "You know, she's been a
Garveyite since she was nineteen, and, boy-oh-boy, was she ever
the strict West Indian mother! When I was younger, I couldn't
understand how she was pushed over the edge by those racist
officials, but now I can. She was a widow working to support her
seven children. No wonder she reached the breaking point. They

say that she felt persecuted." He sat back and chuckled derisively.
"I wonder why! They'd cheated her out of the insurance money
after my father's death, and a white judge coveted our house and
land —the house my father had built with his own hands. That
££
Jan Carew 63
judge wanted the house for one of his relatives. So the state took us
away from our mother and parceled us out to foster parents, and
she was shoved into a mental hospital. But after twenty-five years
of incarceration, twenty-five long years, she came out looking in
better shape than those who railroaded her into that institution. I
went to see her a couple of weeks after she was released. Twenty-
five years had gone by since Ihad last seen her "He paused and
looked into the distance. "Twenty-five years . .
," he repeated and
.
then continued, "She was clearheaded and she put me at my ease,

made it seem as if all those years had not rolled by. She read what
was in my mind, and I guessed what was in hers. We didn't need
words."
Listening to him and averting my eyes, I thought, "This is the
most intimate confession he has made since we met. Perhaps the
awareness that Mantop was waiting to snatch him away from the
land of the living had made it slip out. But if he keeps on the path
he's chosen, he'll never find out about that other side of himself
the side that only his mother could help him to discover —the
Grenadian side with its scattered blood seeds. For in the silences
between them during that reunion, he had most likely caught

waged for her and her
glimpses of the heroic fight his mother had
and in a flash he might well have discerned how
family's survival,
vast and complex the human spirit, human longings, and the
human condition can be, and how unfettered and limitless the
human imagination must be in order to encompass and plumb
them."
"We all have our private devils hounding us down," I said,
opening a new phase of our conversation after an awkward pause.

"White devils," Malcolm said, and then he added with a
mocking smile, "and Black ones. We also have our share of Black
devils."
"Baudelaire, the French poet, once said that the cleverest trick
the devil ever played was to pretend he didn't exist."
"He hit the nail on the head. That's the white man's game in
America — he lynches you, discriminates against you from cradle to

grave, and then he pretends that he isn't doing anything to you.

Man, you sure can pull those quotes out of a hat!"
"Blame it on my colonial education," I and I changed the
said,
subject to one that I had been hesitating to talk about until I felt
more at ease with him.
"What about women and your monkish lifestyle?"
He looked at me with narrowed eyes, and then he said, "I
changed."
There was something mesmeric about Malcolm's asceticism, his
passionate devotion to Islam. He was possessed with all the fervor
of a new believer, and, as he'd said earlier, it was as if he'd rinsed
his brain, his spirit, his whole being with fresh spring water. I had
wanted to ask number of questions about his break with
him a
Elijah Muhammad, for I was certain that there was more to it than
the general assumption that it was based solely on his outrage and
disillusionment at the behavior of the older man. Malcolm was
anything but a simplistic devotee of Elijah. His Black Nationalist
ideas had been gleaned from the early teachings of his Garveyite
mother and father, his experiences as an outlaw in his early
manhood, prison, the in-house cult-philosophy of the Black Mus-
lims, and later his philosophy of resistance to racism and economic
exploitation had been reshaped and internationalized. His break
with Elijah Muhammad, therefore, was political and ideological,
and in addition it was one of principle and the result of the
traumatic discovery that an erstwhile idol had feet of clay.
The statement that Malcolm had made about the Kennedy
assassination was deliberately taken out of context and used as a
device for silencing him. President Kennedy was assassinated on
November 22, 1963. On December 1, Malcolm X, speaking at a
Black Muslim rally at the Manhattan Center in New York, accused
the late president of "twiddling his thumbs" while Patrice
Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo, the Diem
brothers of South Vietnam, and four Birmingham
little girls in
were murdered. "Being an old farm boy myself," Malcolm said,

"chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they
always made me glad." The next day, John Ali, the national
*»V»"
Jan Carew 65
secretary for the Nation of Islam, announced that Eijah Muham-

mad had suspended Malcolm X for ninety days for his remarks.
John Malcolm Shabazz did not

Ali told reporters that "Minister
speak for the Muslims when he made the comments. He was
speaking for himself and has been suspended from public speaking
for the time being."
For some time before his suspension, however, it was becoming
clear to Malcolm that the movement he had played a leading role in
creating had locked itself into a blind vortex, and every time he
tried to make it a genuine activist one, he was thwarted by the
byzantine intrigues of sychophants clustered around Elijah. So,
with or without his discovery of the Messenger's amorous adven-
tures, a break would have been inevitable. The nation-building
fantasies of the movement and its militant rhetoric on the one
hand, and its political quiescence on the other, made it impossible
for Malcolm to continue ignoring the irreconcilable contradictions
in its philosophy of an absolute racial separation. In addition, he
confessed that when he became aware of the Nation's secret
dealings with the Ku Klux Klan, he realized that this movement,
which he had helped to popularize, had in fact maneuvered into a
corner from which it could not extricate itself. He had then
concluded that he either had to take over the movement from
inside and transform it or break with it completely and create
another.
In addition, Malcolm had a disdain for Black petit bourgeois
leaders who dangled the promise of material rewards like the apple
of Tantalus above the heads of their followers. But nodding his
head and smiling, he told me that Elijah Muhammad was craftier
and in every way superior to the run-of-the-mill Black leaders. The
old man, he affirmed, in the midst of preaching austerity and
imposing Calvinist strictures on his followers, did have a weakness
for opulent living and women, but Elijah
a passion for teenage
should never be underestimated because he knew his followers well
and could operate levers of patronage with consummate skill. He
could also appeal, at one and the same time, to their noblest
aspirations and their basest and most mercenary instincts. Behind
the scene, too, he could, when necessary, be benignly tolerant and

charming. As an example of the old man's shrewdness, Malcolm
described how, while his less imaginative followers raised a hue
and cry about it, he had appointed non-Muslims as editors of the
movement's influential newspaper Muhammad Speaks.
At meetings with his inner circle, a former editor of that paper
told me, Elijah would sit and listen patiently as his lieutenants vied
for his favors, and then he'd and ask if any of them
call for silence
could talk directly to Allah and have the Lord of Worlds talk to
them; and when no one dared make this claim, he'd remind them
that he, and he alone, was the Chosen One, the Messenger. Having
silenced them, he would then reveal, slowly and deliberately, what
Allah had allegedly told him.
Malcolm, however, never attempted to make any such claims.
His followers saw him as a bold, transparently honest, and
incorruptible leader. His mesmeric voice called on the lowliest and
the most despised to standup and stretch limbs that were stiff from
too much kneeling, and thousands responded.
Malcolm was, indeed, like that archetypal figure in Teme
cosmology, a truth-teller who was willing to risk all in defense of
the scorned, the rejected, and the despised. He told truths to his
followers with an unsurpassed eloquence before the bullets of
assassins silenced him.
raCSfc
FOUR
To be, or not to be — that is the question
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet
It's
unfortunate that those bent on making Malcolm X into an
icon now that he's safely dead are, in fact, inventing a legendary
being that threatens to supplant the real one. A new generation of
idolators has either deliberately or inadvertently ignored the two
crucial speeches that Malcolm made Oxford Union and the
at the
London School of Economics. In fact, Malcolm used those presti-

gious international platforms to state quite categorically that he
was no longer the spiritual and intellectual prisoner of a sterile
philosophy of race in which, to use his own words, "the revolt of
the Negro [was depicted] as simply a racial conflict of Black against
white, or as a purely American problem." He spelled out clearly in
those two speeches, and in another he had made at Barnard College
during the same three-month period, that he was now an interna-
tionalist who saw himself and his OAAU as part of a "global
rebellion ... of the exploited against the exploiter." He also stated
quite explicitly that while, as a Muslim, he believed in the brother-
67
hood of all men, this did not mean that Black people in the name of
amity with all human beings should forgo all rights to defend
themselves against the violence of racists.
The Oxford Union debate was a milestone in Malcolm's career

as a truth-tellerand as one of the boldest spokespersons for Black
liberation to emerge in the twentieth century.
"I honestly didn't know what to expect when Tony Abrahams
phoned to invite me to Oxford," Malcolm confessed during our
wide-ranging conversations three months later. At the end of his
term as president of the Oxford Union, Anthony Abrahams was
supposed to debate the president of the Cambridge Union. To
bolster his side, he was expected to invite the person he admired
most to debate with him. Anthony chose Malcolm. Another
speaker on his side was Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish nationalist,
poet, and Communist. "Looking back at my four-day visit as a
guest of the Oxford Union," Malcolm continued, "I remember
clearly that the minute I stepped off the train, I felt I'd suddenly
backpedaled into Mayflower-time. Everything was smaller than I
expected, and slower and older. Age was just seeping out of the
pores of every stone. The students were wearing caps and gowns as
if they graduated the first day they arrived and were then handed
diplomas years later, and they were riding bicycles that should've
been dumped long ago. I couldn't help wondering if I'd made a
mistake accepting the invitation to take part in the debate. But
Tony Abrahams had met me at the train station and, somehow, his
Jamaican ease banished some of my doubts. From the moment we
met, I couldn't help noticing how easily he dealt with those white
folks at Oxford, and them seemed to know him. He kept his
a lot of
Jamaicaness and yet he walked around Oxford like he owned it.
Negroes at Harvard and Yale always looked to me as if they were
being apologetic and making excuses for their Black selves in what
they're tricked into thinking is a white holy-of-holies. Looking
back, I must admit that I liked Oxford. It was old and cold, but the
students had open, inquiring minds. It was a place where a ruling
class reserved a special space for the best of minds to be thrown
into a brain-pool where they could learn to think their way out of
Jan Carew 69
any situation, no matter how difficult. That's something Black

folks need to look into, but we would have to shape ours
differently; we'd have to carve out our space to think in the middle
of a struggle in the inner cities, and from there we would have to see
the whole world. Still, at the end of every one of those four days,
when I was alone in my guest apartment, the hustle and bustle of
Harlem never failed to break into the silence and remind me that
there at Oxford, I was near the top of a pyramid while below were
the oppressed carrying it on their backs."
Malcolm was assassinated less than three months after his Oxford
visit, and Anthony Abrahams never again saw him alive. A year
later, after Anthony had graduated from Oxford, I ran into him in
Ghana. had swept us both into directions that neither of us

Life
could have predicted even six months earlier. I had moved to
Ghana and was an adviser to President Nkrumah's Publicity

Secretariat and the editor of African Review. Anthony was work-
ing for the British Broadcasting Corporation as the first Black
announcer on "Panorama" a prime-time program that did in-
depth analyses of current events. He had come to Accra to cover

the opening of the Akosombo Dam, a grandiose hydroelectric
project that was the most ambitious of the large-scale industrial
programs Nkrumah had initiated.
Ghana was a major producer of bauxite ore, gold, and cocoa,

and Nkrumah's ambitious but logical plan was to use the dam's
relatively cheap hydroelectric power to transform a backward
colonial economy into a twentieth-century one. He envisaged an
independent Ghana evolving very rapidly from an exporter of raw
materials to a manufacturer of finished products —aluminum
products from bauxite and a variety of lucrative chocolate prod-
uctsfrom raw cocoa. Like Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Nkrumah was
intenton prodding his people into taking a great leap forward;
however, an ominous and symbolic occurrence marred the official
opening of the dam.When the first rush of current surged from the
dam's generators into the national grid, the main transformers
were blown and Accra was plunged into a primordial darkness. It
was as though that embarrassing blackout (and it could have been

the result of sabotage or sheer incompetence) was meant to jolt the
president into acknowledging that there was a wide chasm between
his soaring vision and the reality of Ghana's shaky infrastructure.
Shortly after covering that opening of the Akosombo Dam,
Anthony was back in Ghana again to report for the BBC on an
entirely different event. While President Nkrumah was on his way
to a peace mission in Hanoi, his government was overthrown by a
cabal of high-ranking military officers. In the immediate aftermath
of the coup, all of the senior officials who supported Nkrumah
were being rounded up and imprisoned in the name of a junta
calling itself the National Liberation Council. This junta, in the
midst of making hypocritical noises about "democracy," was in
the process of releasing one batch of political prisoners and
replacingthem in the prisons with another group. Since soldiers
had already visited my lodgings when I was not at home, I knew
that my arrest was imminent. I also knew that if my arrest was
publicized abroad, the likelihood of my disappearing without a
trace would be considerably reduced. When he left Ghana this
second time, Anthony took a coded message to Andrew Salkey, a
trusted friend and colleague, for me. It was signed Black Midas, the
title of my first novel. I knew that once Andrew got hold of this
coded missive, he would take immediate steps to publicize the news
of my arrest. And that was exactly what happened. However,
Anthony told me afterwards that his BBC superiors had repri-
manded him, claiming that by helping me he had compromised the
BBC's role of impartiality.
Thirty years later, while reminiscing about the past on a popular
radio show in Kingston, Jamaica, an urbane, rotund Anthony and
I began talking about our days in Ghana, about Malcolm's visit to
Oxford, and about their participation in the Oxford Union debate.
After leaving the broadcasting studio, I could not help thinking
that the Africa Malcolm had envisaged spawning a plethora of
liberation movements that would unite the continent and end
white economic domination in short order had —hardly a decade
after his death — been riven, splintered, and further balkanized by a
Jan Carew 71
succession of brutal coups d'etat. In addition, as the cold war

intensified, the new U.S. anti-insurgent policy of low-intensity
conflict devastated and impoverished vast areas of the ancestral
homeland for which Malcolm had had such great expectations.
Some people now claim that it is fortunate Malcolm did not live
to see the end of the cold war and the disasters on the African
continent preceding the cold war's demise. Those successive disas-
ters, they say, make the brutal imperialist intervention in the
Congo had so graphically described seem mild by compari-
that he
son, and this would have filled him with despair. Others, however,
point out that had he lived, his resolve would have been unshaken,
and he would have continued to give heart to those still fighting to
make the African dream of unity and freedom a reality.
I left Jamaica shortly after taking part in that radio show with
Anthony, but I had asked Dermot Hussey to do a tape recording of

Anthony talking about Malcolm's visit to Oxford and their joint
participation in the debate. In the interview with Dermot, the
Jamaican inflections in Anthony's voice were as familiar to me as
they had been three decades before.
"Where shall I begin?" was his opening gambit.
"At the beginning," was Dermot's rejoinder.
"Well, here goes: there's a tradition that the president of the
Oxford Union would, at the end of his term, in what they call the
Presentation Debate invite the person in Britain whom he most
admires. For me, that person wasn't British —and they appreciated
the fact that I wouldn't necessarily have chosen someone —so
British
they asked if there was anybody from Jamaica or anywhere else that
I would like to invite. I said, 'Yes, Malcolm X!' 'Malcolm who? The
man in America who's causing all those problems?' That's the sort of
reaction I got. I think they thought he was Martin Luther King. They
didn't seem to know the difference. Anyhow, they agreed, and we
made contact with Malcolm X and sent the necessary tickets and
what have you, but it turned out at the last moment that he called and
said he wouldn't be able to make it because he was going to Mecca.
We spoke again, and he then agreed that on his way back from
Mecca, he would pass through Britain. And he did. He came up to
Oxford and spent four days with me. The four days, of course,
included the Thursday night of the debate. I think he came on
Tuesday or Wednesday and stayed till Friday.
"Well, I've always followed the American civil rights struggle,
and I saw him as very much the person who was making the most
sense to me. I didn't believe in those days that nonviolence was
going to be the answer. In fact, I really am surprised at the extent to
which America, short of a violent overthrow or a violent upsurge,
would have agreed to go along with the degree of social changes
that have taken place. So my hopes were on Malcolm X, not on
Martin Luther King. I saw Martin Luther King as well, I saw . . .
him as someone complementary to Malcolm, but my man was

always Malcolm.
"There are a couple of things that stick in my memory. First of
all, when he came, I had been 'gated' —confined to my 'gates' after
six in the evening — because in the term before, I had participated in
a demonstration protesting the arrest of Nelson Mandela in South

Africa. . . . Now, Malcolm wasn't my guest in Oxford, he was the
guest of the Oxford Union. We had planned whole series of
a
events for him for those four nights. But the minute he heard that I
was gated for my
Mandela demonstrations, he said he
role in the
wasn't going to attend any of those events either. You know, that
was rather nice. ... So every night he came to my apartment during
the time he was there. And that was an experience! Because [as]
president of the Oxford Union [I was] sort of the center of a lot of
—
student activities and you don't become president of the Oxford
Union on a black vote. So there were lots of white friends dropping
in, and so forth and so on. And Malcolm would hold forth every
night during the four nights and four days he was there. ... I was
sharing this apartment with Richard Fletcher — Richard is now
with the American Development Bank — and we opened the doors
between our two rooms, and sort of turned the two rooms into a
mini-mall and Malcolm would sit there and talk to those white
. . .
students. If there were forty students there at a time, thirty-six of

them would be white. And he would talk about 'white devils' —
remember that phrase, 'white devils' I remember sitting there and —
Jan Carew 73
hearing him talk about white devils, and the white students would
clap. I thought that was a most remarkable experience. Here was
this man talking about racial injustice, and, well, he didn't mince
words. If you looked at his thoughts, they were not violent
thoughts, they were reasoned thoughts. But his language was
violent. I really mean it, he didn't mince words! And seeing those
white kids cheering this man who was talking about white oppres-
sion was remember that very clearly.
really something. I
"I also remember walking with him in Oxford. We went through

the Oxford Union building where there were photographs of all the
previous presidents and their presidential debates, and in all those
photographs, everybody taking part in those debates as was the —
tradition for several hundred years —
was dressed in tails. We
would wear tails and waistcoats and white, starched formal attire.
He saw all this, and it immediately dawned on him that he didn't
—
have tails in fact, that he hadn't come to Oxford to wear tails. So
I told him immediately, 'You don't have to wear tails.' I didn't tell
him that I'd already raised the question with my committee and
everyone had agreed to make this exception for him. He said
nothing. And we walked out and about. You know, we must have
walked for about twenty-five yards when he turned to me and said,
'I really don't like wearing tails, but if it's going to be any
embarrassment to you at all, I'd be happy to wear tails.' I just
thought that in those days you would hardly expect anyone from
the radical side of things to make that kind of concession. Perhaps
that was indicative of how much he had changed since his early
days of hot gospeling.
"We spent a lot of time discussing his relationship with Martin
Luther King and the whole civil rights movement in America. He
told me and Martin corresponded and that they spoke to
that he
each other, but there were real differences between them, even
though the differences were sincere and genuine ones. Yes, Mal-
colm never spoke disparagingly of him at all. He confided that even
if King's approaches were right, he felt that his approach, at worse,
would facilitate King's approach. I thought that was very good.

"The other thing I remember is that I had a girlfriend well, not —
exactly a girlfriend, but one of the young ladies around the Oxford
Union with whom
was very friendly. And she, listening to this
I
man every night, became fascinated, hanging on every word.

really
. .She came to me one night and said, 'Can we take him home
.
tonight?' I said to her, 'Look, this is a religious man, you know.'

She looked at me sort of feeling, 'Which of you can escape us?' So
I allowed her to take him home, and I wasn't surprised when she
came back rather speedily, sort of surprised that there was this rare
Black man who turned down a beautiful woman. Which again
reenforced for me, in a very small and insignificant way, I suppose,
his integrity.
"... The actual motion of the debate was 'Extremism in the
defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is
no virtue.' This was a statement made by Barry Goldwater from
the far right, and I had adopted it as the motion.
"... You must understand Cambridge is the
that at Oxford,
only other place that exists, and vice versa. The Oxford boat . . .
race is all about beating Cambridge, and with cricket it's the same
thing. It was crucial that the president of the Oxford Union [with
his chosen partner] win the debate against his Cambridge oppo-
nent [and bis chosen partner]. But Malcolm was not the usual
. . .
protagonist. Usually, it was someone from within a member of —

the House of Commons or some such individual. Ted Heath, an
ex-president of the Union who later became prime minister of
Britain, was going to support the president of the Cambridge
Union against Malcolm and me. But at the last moment he backed
off. I don't think he wanted to cross swords with us. Instead
Humphrey Barkley, a Conservative member of Parliament and —

—
one who was quite liberal took on the task. I must tell you,
though, I was sorry for him. I have never been as sorry for a man as
I was for Humphrey Barkley that night, because Malcolm took his
speech and, I mean, he just tore him up. I myself was always careful
in dealing with race with people on the other side of the aisle. I
didn't want to ruffle their sensibilities too much. But with Malcolm
and Humphrey, it was something else. The amazing thing, though,
was to see those white people standing up and cheering Malcolm X
Jan Carew 75
as he demolished that white man. You know, certainly in terms of

the Oxford of those days,
Conservative, because he
Humphrey Barkley was a popular
was a liberal Conservative. I can't
remember all the players in the debate that night the main ones —
j
were Malcolm and I on one side, and Christie Davis and
Humphrey Barkley on the other. Those are really my major
recollections of the debate.
remember that we would talk all day walking down and
"But I
about Oxford. We'd go shopping and, you know, Malcolm X

never repeated himself once in those four days. And, to me, his
most interesting gift was his gift of analogy. He would make a
point, and then he would use an analogy to illustrate that point.
. .His use of analogy was absolutely brilliant, and his command
.
of the English language was something extraordinary. And to me

again, and you must remember that I am of the West in Oxford, I
am very impressed with Oxford and would sort of tread gently on
sensibilities, but to see Oxford bend down at the knees to a Black
man was remarkable, because that is what happened that week. I

mean, in the Oxford Union, you are amongst the cream of the
English students. It's a place where you congregate. It's not just
beer cellars and libraries and so forth. Yet within four days, I mean,
we had no room in my flat at night. It was like a movie house with
people lined up and trying to get in. In the crowded room, six
would go out and then six would come in. The overall thing is that
he would speak and they would cheer. The way in which he
reached people was very reasoned. It was never abusive.
"I remember, too, that he was of the firm view that the American
government was out to kill him. He spoke very disparagingly of
Elijah Muhammad in terms of his visit to Mecca. I think that is
where his death might have come from because, reinforced with his
visit Mecca, he probably would have started his own church,
to
something much more fundamental than Muhammad in terms of
being true to Islam. He was very, very preoccupied with the
possibility of his death. I'm not absolutely certain, but my recollec-
tion is that he was more fearful of the American government
authorities than he was of Elijah Muhammad.
76 GHOSTS I\ OIR BLOOD
"We discussed his role in the struggle, and he saw it as critical in

terms of supporting the nonviolent groups. At that time, Martin
Luther King was very much the recognized Black leader, and
attempts were being made to paint Malcolm as some kind of
lunatic extremist. He answered that allegation with reasoned
arguments, and that was impressive about the man. You didn't get
was any prejudice in him at all. I think
the impression that there
that what those English students might have sensed that his
is
American white audiences might not have sensed that this was —
not a man motivated by hatred of white people. This was a man
who operated at a totally cerebral level. You got the feeling that
you were dealing with a very careful, scholarly man who saw clear
distinctions and who could illuminate those distinctions by anal-
ogy. I had expected to meet someone who was hurt, angry,
quarrelsome, bitter. This wasn't the case. He was totally cerebral,
totally intellectual, and a nonemotional person."
It would surprise many Black and white Americans to hear

Malcolm described as "totally cerebral and totally intellectual."
That, however, was how he was perceived by many who heard him
debate at the Oxford Union, speak at the London School of
Economics, and address audiences in France and in several African
countries. The way that the Oxford Union debate was reported by
—
the Western media, however when it was reported at all
reminds me of Rashomon, that imaginative Japanese film directed
by Kurosawa. In it, seven eyewitnesses give completely contradic-
tory accounts of the same event. As the story unfolds in scene after
scene, it is hard to believe that those eyewitnesses are talking about
the same event. The BBC television, using a short excerpt from
Malcolm's speech and deliberately placing it out of context, was
operating very much in the Rashomon tradition. The easily forget-
table witticisms of Christie Davis were highlighted and Humphrey
Barkley's tepid peroration given much play. The fact is, though,
that Barkley had made the mistake of calling Malcolm "North
America's leading exponent of apartheid" and adding insult to
Jan Carew 77
injury, he said that "Liberty to him means racial segregation."

Barkley paid dearly for this when Malcolm demolished his insults
and arguments with a calculated and remorseless logic.
The motion that was debated was, in fact, one of the more
famous statements on extremism made by Barry Goldwater at the
Cow Palace in San Francisco when he accepted the Republican
nomination for the American presidential election. There had been
an attempt by more moderate Republicans to induce the party to
condemn certain extremist right-wing groups, especially the John
Birch Society, but Goldwater had brushed this aside and had given,
it seemed at the time, a green light to these right-wing groups that
veered close to the lunatic fringe. But subsequent events proved
that Goldwater had greater prescience than his detractors had
credited him with. He foresaw the national shift to the right more
clearly than they did.
In order to discredit whatever Malcolm said during the debate,
the BBC announcers made sure to point out that among those
arguing in favor of the motion were Malcolm X, "one of the
leaders of the BlackMuslims in America," and Hugh MacDiarmid,
a Scottish nationalist who, even more dreadful than being Black,
radical, and a nationalist, had the malice to be a Communist. So
Malcolm was, by implication, firmly relegated to an extremist
corner. The contumacious labels were meant to intimate to the
viewers that these two debaters were not to be taken seriously no
matter what they said. Incidentally, Malcolm was, at the time, no
longer a Black Muslim, a point he made very clearly at the
beginning of his speech when he said, "I am a Muslim and my
religion is Islam. As a Muslim, I believe in the brotherhood of all
peoples,and Iam absolutely against discrimination in any shape or
form." The BBC commentators, however, deliberately chose to
ignore these statements. They wanted to demonize Malcolm and
portray him as a bigot. A Black male truth-teller was a threat to
their cozy and racist beliefs.
Nevertheless, there was still much that could be seen even on the
edited tapes of the BBC. Anthony Abrahams set the tone of the
debate when he opened his arguments by appealing to the audience

not to concern itself with Goldwater, but rather to concentrate on
the matter of political principle:
"To defend this statement, I would like to start with a quotation
that is only too well known, but only too easily forgotten: 'Man is
born free, but is now everywhere in chains.' What greater right

does a man have but his freedom? And it is my contention tonight
that any man or any nation who seeks to deny another man or
another nation of his liberty is, by definition, an extremist. He has
striven to take away a man's most basic right and we must be
extremely vicious in our reaction to such men. Because, what are
the methods they use? Which despot, which dictator ever threat-
ened another's liberty with reason and moderation? Which nation
was ever subjugated in a gentlemanly fashion? ... A few days ago,
I spoke in the Cambridge Union on the use of violence in South
Africa. On that occasion, the argument which the moderates

advanced was simply this: Think about the innocent women and
children in South Africa.' It is my contention that this is the price
we have to pay 'What about the
for liberty. Britain didn't ask,
innocent women and children in Nazi Germany?' Britain couldn't
even ask, 'What about the women and children of this country?'
. The oppressor uses force and understands nothing else. ... If
. .
we are afraid to meet oppression with extreme action, then we will

be oppressed. . . . We are free because we fought to protect our
freedom. Tomorrow we will be enslaved if we falter."
Abrahams, Malcolm, and MacDiarmid were, in fact, taking the

Goldwater quote and using it in a fashion that its author could
never possibly have imagined when he trumpeted it at the Cow
Palace. Goldwater had used it to endorse white bigotry, while they
turned it around and used it in defense of liberty and freedom from
racism for all people.
MacDiarmid began by lampooning the "doctrine of moderation
in all things" and declaring that "it was the most abominable,
antivital doctrine that was ever promulgated in the history of
mankind." He followed up this opening salvo with the William
Jan Carew 79
Blake dictum that "The road to excess leads to the Palace of

Wisdom" and, in a more serious vein, declared, "I know no
national liberation movement that has been won without a terrible
struggle, without civil disobedience, violence, war or civil war."
This heretical Scotsman then threw in a number of quotes from
Mao Tse-tung: "What is the strength of the imperialists? It lies only
in the unconsciousness of the people" and "Humanity is in its
infancy. When it is full grown, what will it make of our world?"
But after ruminating over the arguments of all the speakers,
those for and those against the motion, I always return to Mal-
colm's eloquent and unequivocal advocacy of a genuine racial
democracy, for it continues to have an authentic and contemporary
ring to it after thirty years. In retrospect, the arguments raised in
opposition to Malcolm merely provide us with an entertaining
discourse.
At the end of Oxford Union debate Malcolm, with
his historic
subtlety and aplomb, slipped in a quotation from Hamlet's time-
less soliloquy to reinforce his concluding arguments. He intro-
duced the quotation by saying that Hamlet, when he launched
was apparently reluctant to make up his
himself into this soliloquy,
mind, which the audience laughed heartily. But when the
at
laughter died down, Malcolm's mood changed from a bemused
jocularity to a somber earnestness. He made it quite clear what he
meant by the terms moderation on the one hand and extremism on
the other, and he did this by adding his own comments to
Shakespeare's passage:
To be or not to be —that is the question

y
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
[moderation]
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them [extremism].
on in that soliloquy, one finds much else that

Ironically, further
touched on Malcolm's imminent death at the hands of assassins:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud mans contumely
. . . the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes.
Malcolm was aware and malevolent enemies had

that powerful
decided to kill him. He understood more profoundly than most
that with the ferment in the ghettos, on the streets, and on the
campuses, a decision had been made by senior policymakers in
Washington to discredit, buy off, imprison, or kill progressive

leaders, particularly those of color,and to substitute the pimps,
drug dealers, and gangsters as role models for the young. Because
of this, Malcolm was determined to denounce racism, trumpet a
message of Black pride, and affirm as an Afro-Carib shaman had
done that "all peoples have a right to share the waters of the River
own cups, but our cups have been
of Life, and to drink with their
broken." Malcolm insisted that we not only have to mend our
broken cups, but that we have to have a say in how the waters of
the River of Life should be shared.
FIVE
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will . .
—Shakespeare, Hamlet
Malcolm was pensive for a while. Then he said, "You know, I
get into the strangest discussions with you. Usually, I just
don't have the time for exchanges like this."

"Maybe flu never islanded you in a hotel room in a foreign
country before," I pointed out. As if to underline the fact that our

conversations could take us down unusual intellectual paths, he said:
"I liked the way Shakespeare portrayed that Hamlet guy. Read
the play in prison, and learned whole passages by heart."
"So that's why you ended your Oxford Union debate with 'To
"
be or not to be, that is the question. . . .
'
"You remember?" He seemed genuinely surprised and pleased.

"The Malcolm X that the press portrays is hardly one who
would quote Shakespeare so aptly," I said.
"Tony Abrahams told me afterwards that it really shocked them
when I laid that quotation on them," he said with a mischievous
grin.
"To use a British understatement, I, too, was mildly surprised,"
I said.
81
"That Hamlet guy was really mixed up. He couldn't make up his
mind about some things, but he loved his father and never forgave
his mother for betraying him and then jumping right into marriage
with the uncle," he said.
"The fellow sounded too good to be true," I said, because

Malcolm had looked away from me and seemed to be mulling over
sad and private thoughts.
"Who, Hamlet?" he asked absentmindedly.
"No, The fellow was so perfect that his wife obviously
his father.
began to find him a bit of a bore, and when the fun-loving and
unscrupulous uncle came along, she fell for his line of sweet talk.
Now Hamlet, on the other hand, was in love not with a flesh-and-
blood mother but with a perfect being he had created in his
imagination, and when he saw her having a ball with his raunchy
uncle, jealousy began to gnaw at his guts."
There was an awkward silence, which he broke by returning,

somewhat good-naturedly, to the issue of ancestral links by
confessing that the Chinese and Arabs he'd met had also asked him
about his family history.
"It took me a while," he confessed ruefully, "to realize that they
were not just making polite small talk, but trying to find out who I
really was. I'll start digging into the family history as soon as I'm
back home," he promised.
"You should begin with your mother," I suggested, "A Chinese
proverb says that women hold up half the sky."
"I and I sensed that he was talking
need time," Malcolm said,
about much more than the immediate topic.

" To be or not to be,' " I said jokingly. "When a man is pulled in
several directions by doubts, the Russians, who are a very literary
people, say that he's suffering from Hamletism."
"In short, you're implying that that's my complaint?"
"Perhaps."
"But I've already made up my mind. You see, you have the
option of staying here and spinning out theories, and I can't say in
all honesty that I don't envy you. Those four and a half days at
Oxford were more stimulating intellectually than anything I had
Jan Carew 83
experienced on the street or in my locked-away, mind-blinkered

Black Muslim period. But was the sum total of all my experi-
it
ences, good and bad, that made the Oxford one so stimulating. If I
stayed there too long, I'd just dry up and wither away. So I've got to
go back to a brutal, racist country where our folks have to learn
how to organize for self-defense. The theory has to be part of that
struggle or else would be
it like froth that disappears before you
can taste it, I know
that you mean well with all this talk about
ancestors and roots, and what did you call it? Hamletism? You're
telling me in so many words that I shouldn't go back right now. But
I've made up my mind, and I'm going back," he said, facing me.
"All right," I said, looking him in the eye, "the real issue is this:
our ancestors survived because there were those who were willing
to live for the struggle, and those who were ready to die for it. I'm
suggesting that you should seriously consider the option of living
for the struggle, going into hiding, writing, studying, evolving ....
I'm certain that you'll never sell out .... Before the Harpers Ferry
raid,John Brown had a secret meeting with Frederick Douglass
and pleaded with him to call for a general slave uprising. But if
Douglass had done this, he'd have been a martyr, and after the
bloodbath the Black struggle would've been held in check for at
least fifty years."
"Who knows? The Black struggle might have advanced a

hundred years if he'd called for that uprising. Anyway, like I said
before, I've made up my mind," he said, and the finality in his voice
made it clear that he wasn't prepared to discuss the matter any

further.
He looked away from me and said thoughtfully, "My mind was
closed when I was under Elijah Muhammad's influence. I was like
a sleepwalker for twelve years, butmy mind's wide awake now.
And it's not just Elijah Muhammad, but white America that
blinkers our minds. During my African visits, I talked to President
Nasser, President Nyerere, President Kenyatta, President Azikiwe,
President Nkrumah,
President Sekou Toure, and Prime Minister
Ben and there are others whose names I can't mention. They
Bella,
all shared some of their valuable time with me to discuss the plight
of Negroes in America and to talk about colonialism, racism, and

the need for unity of the world's oppressed peoples. Not one of
them bought the State Department propaganda about American
Negroes being content with their lot as second-class citizens. I
didn't for one moment flatter myself that I was some kind of special
being talking to them, because I knew that through me they were
expressing their solidarity with the twenty-two million oppressed
Negroes in America. So they spent hours talking to me. Those talks
broadened my outlook and made it crystal clear to me that had to I
look at the struggle in America's ghettos against the background of

a worldwide struggle of oppressed peoples. That's why, after every
one of my trips abroad, America's rulers see me as being more and
more dangerous. That's why I feel in my bones that the plots to kill
me have already been hatched in high places. The triggermen will
only be doing what they were paid to do."
Listening to him and observing him as he moved restlessly
around his hotel room, it occurred to me that during this visit to
Britain he had become more aware of how others saw him.
Realizing how intense he must have appeared, Malcolm occasion-
ally paused, smiled, and relaxed. It was during one of these pauses
that I steered our talk away from the morbid subject of the threats
to his life and said, "The Ejaus of the Niger say that journeys to far
places help to scrape you down to the simplest common denomina-
tor of what you really are as a human being."
"Scraping, huh? My father used to preach about the scales
falling from people's eyes, but that African scraping deals with the
whole body. Can you imagine our Toms being scraped down to the
simplest common denominator of what they really are as human
beings?" he asked rhetorically. "It would turn them into jellyfish,
because it's only the crusts that are holding them up." After
reflecting for a while, he asked, "Look, why not tell me more about
yourself? How is it that you survived this scraping?"
"Well, I suppose the scraping down didn't turn me into jelly, so

I go around taking it for granted that I have a right to be here."
"And you said that you're married to an English woman, an
upper-class one?"
Jan Caren 85
"That's right, my wife army colonel when I

was married to an
met her, and she had three children by him, and now she has a
fourth by me. You met my daughter at the reception, remember?"
He acknowledged that he had with a nod and a smile, and I
continued, "You see, in my Guyanese culture, if you fall in love
with a woman and she has children, then it's natural as breathing
to marry the woman and take her children under your wing as if
they were your own."
He laughed out loud, stood up, stretched, and, shaking his head,
declared, "Brother Jan, you have problems. A white woman and
her white children plus one of your own! In the States, rednecks
would've tried to lynch you or bomb your house, and if that didn't
work, they'd hound you down in the courts. And what does the
. . .
colonel think of all this?"

"He's from the Scottish-Irish nobility. And his ancestors were
professional soldiers and empire builders before him. He followed
in their footsteps for a while, but he resigned from the army when
they started 'planning to fight a nuclear war.' He's a decent chap,
one of those rare individuals who, despite being trained to be a
racist from birth, isn't a racist. Race doesn't bother him, as the
Ghana say, at-all at-all."
folks in
"And what about your friends?"
"What about them?"
"Didn't any of them turn against you after you married a white
woman?"
"My friends don't mind, but my
mother does. She wrote saying
that she was glad that I was getting married and settling down, but
couldn't I have married a nice young woman from home whose
family she knew? She added that she hoped I wasn't planning to
bring my English wife back to Guyana. You see, after having lived
and worked in the States for years, she has an abiding suspicion of
all white people. She divides them into three categories: those who
act white —the majority; a small minority who in spite of the
racism everywhere around them act like normal, decent human
beings; then there are the rabid racists, whom she describes as
human beasts. As for my friends, intermarriage is old hat. Since the
end of the war, it's become

commonplace. Sometimes the
pretty
racism encourages rather than discourages it. There's a racist myth
that every Black man has a magical sugar stick between his legs.
The word is out on the gossip-gram over here that J. Edgar
Hoover's obsessed with this myth of the black super-stud. I heard
this from a Negro journalist who was on the Washington beat. But
isn't that the archetypal myth that's lodged in the mind of every
white male, and the American white male in particular? And many
white women believe it, too, while all too many Negro men try to
live up to it. White racism credits us with having phenomenal
sexual prowess, but it doesn't credit us with having much in the
way of intelligence."
"And what about your wife's friends?"
"She lost a couple, but of the ones who remained her friends, a
few of them wanted to find out if sleeping with a Black man did,
indeed, bring magical sexual delights. Every time she turned her
back, one of them tried to explore that myth with me. My wife's
father, though, is a white settler in Kenya, and he refused to have
anything to do with her. But, then again, she was a rape-child. Her
mother hated her, and she hated her mother right back. As for her
father, during her entire adult life she must have seen him only half
a dozen times."
"This is a strange place," Malcolm said. "I've seen the insides of
U.S. cities, the raw insides, but, if anything, London's worse."

I explained further why intermarriage wasn't anything unusual
in Britain: "At first, the immigrants were mostly male, but the
gender thing became more balanced from the early 1950s onward.
When I first came to Britain, women of color were, as we say in
Guyana, scarcer than good gold."
"The situation here is different," Malcolm acknowledged once
more, and I continued:
"Something that most people don't realize is this: yes, the British
had an empire on which the sun never set, and although thousands
of Britons fanned out to populate their empire, most of them stayed
at home and lived both physically and mentally surrounded by
picket fences and brick walls and hedges. Our ancestors didn't
Jan Carew 87
travel of their own free will either, after that first, forced Atlantic
crossing. So when we mother country by

started immigrating to the
the thousands, white, stay-at-home Britons began having perma-
nent, swarthy next-door neighbors in large numbers for the first
time. And with the loss of empire and the realization that British is
no longer best, unprincipled politicians have begun to use us as

ready-made scapegoats."
"You folks had better get your act together. Right now you have
conversation, dialogue, but soon there'll be aggression, and when
it reaches that stage, you're going to have to be ready and able to
defend yourselves. You can take my word for it, law won't defend
you," Malcolm warned.
"The aggression stage is already upon us, man, but it will take a
long time and almost unbearable racist pressures for our dark
million to realize that they must unite and link up with Black and
other Third World peoples all over the world," I cautioned.
"Then you'd better get to work right away."
"That's what we're trying to do with Magnet. Garvey said that
first we must change our way of thinking, and then, peacefully,
fashion the weapons with which to fight, and we're trying to follow
that Garveyite advice. That's the only way we can survive with
dignity as a people."
"Those are good points," Malcolm declared, nodding his ap-
proval, "and I like that part about peacefully fashioning the
weapons to fight with! That's good advice."
"You know, when it comes to race relations, the British are even
more arrogant and ignorant than the most benighted white Ameri-
cans. In their heart of hearts, they'd like to see every man, woman,
and child of color dispatched to some faraway limbo-land. The
American whites, in the midst of their virulent race baiting, know
in their bones that they need to have Blacks around. Without those
Black-white hatreds to generate a certain kind of energy deep

inside that nation's guts, the United States would suffer from a
terrible sense of emptiness. Racism, the oppression and degrada-
tion of women, and multiple ethnic hatreds provide the glue that
holds the aggressive, white, male-dominated, profit-hungry ruling
sectors of America together. I always remember how Chekhov,

that Russian medical doctor turned writer, saw thehuman condi-
tion through sharply focused creative lenses when he wrote that
mankind — take note, he didn't say 'womankind' — is more easily
united by hatred, malice, greed, and envy than by ideas of love,
charity, and compassion. The growing racism in Britain and
Europe is living proof of this. same breath, as I

But, in the
mentioned before, black-white conversation below the waist is
easier in these parts than it is in America. If black-white copulation
could've solved the race question here, it would've done so long
ago. But there's another side of the business of miscegenation that
the whites never like to look Wherever the British and European
at.
males landed during the age of exploration and colonization, nine

months later there were children of mixed races born to native
mothers. And with every corner of the earth being so easily
accessible these days, the tempo of interracial mixing has in-
creased. Here in Britain, interracial sex is pretty common, and it's
been taking place since the time of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
She got so upset about the sizable Black population in England that
she passed an anti-Black immigration law. Then more recently,
during the two world wars, thousands of West Indian, African,
Afro-American, and colored Commonwealth servicemen and
women helped to increase the mixed-race population."
Malcolm brought me back to the story of my life in Britain when
he asked with an amused insistence, "So what about this English
colonel, the one whose wife you stole? Didn't I hear you say that
you were still on friendly terms?"
"Stole is not the right word —" I chided him, and he recanted.
"All right, pitched some woo at and married."
"Yes, the colonel and I are friends. Relations between us have
always been pretty cordial. After all, I had custody of his children."
"It sure is different here," Malcolm acknowledged ruefully.
"Before I went on my travels, I'd have denounced you as a traitor

to the race. I might not even have believed your story, because I
wouldn't have wanted to believe it."
"Which race?" I asked facetiouslv, "because here in Britain

Jan Carew 89
Black could mean Black, brown, or yellow —West Indian, African,

or Asian."
"In America, Black means Negro, a person of color who speaks
with a Black southern accent or an inner-city one. A friend of mine
wore a turban and used a phony accent, and he was accepted in
lily-white circles in Georgia and Alabama. It can confuse an
outsider who hears about this kind of thing, but the white man
plays all kinds of mind games on us. In the midst of lynching and
brutalizing us, he has still persuaded most of us that U.S. Blacks are
superior to you King George Negroes or anyone else of color for
that matter."
"The do that everywhere. First they overwhelm us
imperialists
with their white, male symbols," I concurred, "then they play
divide-and-rule games with us. They sell us the idea of a white God,
a white Jesus, the West on top, the rest of us below! The white king
is dead, long live the white queen! Right now, it's different here,
different in many ways from the U.S. While interracial marriage

may be easier and less hazardous here, the job situation is where it
was in the U.S. at the beginning of this century. And the way things
look at the moment, the British seem hell-bent on moving back-
wards into the future where race relations are concerned." There
was a pause in our conversation until I broke the silence and put
into words the questions I had been eager to ask earlier.
"I keep reading about a new Malcolm X, a transformed El-Hajj
Malik El-Shabazz, a man whose worldview was drastically
changed after a pilgrimage to Mecca. You see, the man who came
to Britain three months ago and took part in the debate at the
Oxford Union and the one facing me right now is the only
Malcolm we know. Is this one really a new Malcolm X?"
"No. I'm one and the same person, the son of a mother and
father who were devoted Garveyites all of their lives. The son of a
father who was murdered and a mother who was mentally cruci-
fied by racists. I'm carrying on the work they started, just as my
children will carry on my work when I am gone. Before they carted
my mother off to a mental hospital and tore our family apart, she
kept telling us that without an education we'd be like people
blindfolded in a forest pockmarked with quicksand. I strayed from

those teachings of hers for years, but I came back, didn't I? My
vision of the struggle has been broadened, that's true, but my basic
commitment is the same. Is racism dead and buried? Can I trust the
white American any more than I did before? Are white liberals less
treacherous than they were before?"
"But some of your views have changed," I insisted.
"Shouldn't that be a natural part of everybody's intellectual

growing up?" he demanded sharply.
"Take your views on interracial marriage, for example," I
continued. "I read that you were totally against it, and here I am
telling you about my English wife and English stepchildren and
you laugh it off. I told you earlier about my great-gran's theory

about the mixture of ghosts in our blood, and you took that in your
stride too. All these polyglot bloods, however we came by them,
are as much a part of us as our white and red corpuscles
—
"But the only blood relations who would welcome you, accept
you as one of their own, are the Blacks and the Indians. The others
would regard you as an embarrassment they'd rather not face," he
said, raising his voice. Then he continued to expound, as though
speaking to a large gathering, "A month ago, when I was in

Canada, I made my views on interracial marriage crystal clear. I
said that it was just a matter of one human being marrying another,
and it's only the white man's hostility that blows it up into such a
big deal." He paused and then continued, "Your daughter
what's her name again?"
"Lizaveta, but I call her Liza. I named her after the character in
Pushkin's Queen of Spades. It's strange, when I took her to the

Soviet Union and we were driving across the country, the Russians
kept saying that she looked like Pushkin's daughter."
"But will she grow up Negro or English?" the shrewd
to be
Malcolm asked, because he knew from his mother's experience
that balanced in an uneasy equipoise between Black and white, if
you tried to deny your Black blood, there was always a heavy
psychological price to pay.
"If she chooses to be English, she'd have to deny my existence
Jan Carew 91
and that of all of my ancestors, and that denial would haunt her for
the rest of her days."
Malcolm nodded soberly and looked away for a few seconds.
Then, turning back to me, he said, "The little bit of walking around
London that I've done with you sure was an eye-opener."

"How do you mean?"
"You're an arrogant Negro," he said with a wide grin.
"Arrogant?"
"Yes, I noticed the same thing with Tony Abrahams."
"We come from small places, where we're in the majority. By the
time we home, we know who we
leave are, and nobody can take
away that certainty of knowing."
SIX
Africa I have kept your memory Africa
you are inside me
Like the splinter in the wound
like the guardian fetish in the center of the village
. . . we proclaim the oneness of the suffering
and the revolt
of all the peoples on all the face of the earth
and we mix the mortar of the age of brotherhood
out of the dust of idols.
—Jacques Roumain, "Bois-d'Ebene"
The same heart, the same pulse that beats in the Black
man on the African continent today is beating in the
heart of the Black man in North America, Central
America, South America, and in the Caribbean. Many of
them don't know it, but it's true.
—Malcolm X, London School of Economics,

February 11, 1965
M alcolm was due to speak

don School of Economics
at the Old Theatre at the Lon-
in a short while, and he looked
93
decidedly better as the time drew near. Dermot Hussey had joined
us and there were desultory exchanges as Malcolm got ready. I said
jokingly, "We'll act as your bodyguards," but he did not respond.
As we watched Malcolm getting dressed, it struck me again that,
somehow, no one had ever captured what he really looked like. It
was easier to match iridescent colors in a kaleidoscope than to
capture the real persona of this remarkable man. It would forever
elude the bright lights, the television cameras, the swift, incandes-
cent flare of flashbulbs. And as for artists trying to paint portraits
of him, the more the artists watched, the less they appeared to have
seen. And I thought:
"They say that not even the most gifted artists of their time could
capture a reasonable likeness of Ignatius Loyola on a canvas or in
stone. Malcolm X —
and Loyola five centuries separate them and
how different one is from the other but they have this in com- —
mon: no one will ever know what Loyola looked like, and no one
who didn't see Malcolm in the flesh will ever know what he really
looked like."
When we were about to leave the hotel, he said, "It would be
better if we didn't leave together."
"Of course we'll leave together," Dermot and I protested at the

same time.
"I can be gunned down at any time," he said with a furrowed
brow.
We said nothing, but we walked on either side of him across the
hotel lobby and into the narrow, bustling street.
But at that moment I, too, felt hunted and surrounded by

omnipotent and cruel eyes watching our every move and by
electronic ears eavesdropping on our every word. In the midst of a
sudden bout of paranoia, I was sure Mantop had drawn so close
that his breath was almost touching our faces. I glanced sideways
at Malcolm, and in the pale light of a winter afternoon he seemed
to be taking in everything that was going on around him. I looked
straight ahead. The shapes and forms around me, the muted colors
and the noise of traffic made me want to flee to the sanctuary of my
Wimbledon house.
Jan Carew 95
It occurred to me, too, as it had never done before, that I usually
went about my business in this city wrapped up in my own

thoughts and barely noticing my surroundings. I told myself,
"Anonymity definitely has advantages." Then I wondered, "What
would it be like to live the rest of my life under the scrutiny of those
eyes? Malcolm," I reminded myself, "has lived under surveillance
so long that he now takes it for granted. Eurocentric history, Du
Bois said, is that of the hunter writing about the lion. Well,
Malcolm's a simba who's speaking back, and because of this the
white hunters and their Black gun carriers, trackers, and house
boys are out to bag him."
As we walked toward my car, he said casually, "They warned
me that England was cold, and it is." He adjusted his Astrakhan
hat and buttoned his coat. But I noticed that despite his easy,
bantering tone, he trusted no one at that moment, for he knew in
his bones that those tracking him down had eyes and ears in every
corner of the earth.
I thought that we'd become very close, but out there on the cold
and impersonal London streets a chasm opened between us. I knew
that neither the adulation of thousands nor the devotion of many
who were willing to die for him would have been enough to fill the
void of loneliness surrounding him. For in the midst of fighting for
the dark millions in Africa and the Americas, he was in danger of
being transformed into a black version of that Dostoyevskian
character who loved the human race so much that he could not
bear to have another person in a room with him for long.
As we settled into my car, I bridged an uncomfortable silence by
talking about the weather.
"When you first come here, the weather torments you, perse-
cutes you, goads you to despair, and dries your dark skin until it
looks like an ashen alligator's. But you have to psych yourself up to

go outdoors and fight the cold. You tell yourself every morning as
you step outside your front door that you have to fight against
millions of prejudiced English people plus thousands of West
Indian, Indian, Pakistani, African, and other Commonwealth
middle-class aspirants who have been wearing white masks so long
that they can't take them off. Then you boast to yourself that the
sun's in your blood, that you've inherited an invincible heart from
ancestors, and that in spite of the darkness that comes in the
afternoon, you still keep seeing the bluest skies and the brightest
suns in your mind's eye."
"Toms who wear white masks for so long that they can't show
their real faces anymore!" He laughed out loud, and the chasm that
had opened between us was narrowed by that laughter.
I parked on Norfolk Street and as we walked toward Aldwych
and the London School of Economics, I pointed out the West India
Committee building, Fleet Street, the BBC Bush House, the Indian
High Commission, and the theater district.
"This whole area is where the past and the present collide.
There's the West India Committee where the sugar barons had
their headquarters. They made the deals to buy and sell millions of
our ancestors, to scatter them across a hemisphere, and often to
work them to death on plantations, but they themselves were
careful never to touch the money while it was still slippery with our
blood. By the time it reached them, it was laundered and per-
fumed."
"Tell me more about those students I'm about to face. Folks say
they're liberal, but how liberal are they?"
"They're liberal all right, staunchly antiwar and antiapartheid,

but when it comes to doing something concrete about racial
discrimination here in Britain, they'll go into an intellectual orbit
and you'll need a telescope to locate their position. No matter what
kind of radical noises they make at the LSE, they're aspirants to the
and with the empire dwindling, they're afraid
British ruling class,
that fewer and fewer of them will actually make it. Their left-wing
posturing is merely a way of being noticed. They're also noted for
their irreverence and their ability to rile a speaker with loaded
questions."
He and then he said, "There's no crowd that's
listened intently
more irreverent than a Harlem one. If you can get by as a speaker in
Harlem you can make it anywhere."
Jan Carew 97
There were reporters waiting to question Malcolm as he, Dermot,

and were greeted by the sponsors of his talk at the main entrance
I
of the London School of Economics. Malcolm parried the ques-

tions deftly, smiled, and moved on. A persistent reporter, tagging
along behind us, asked, "Mr. X, have you ever been mistaken for a
white man in any of the countries you visited?" Malcolm paused,
faced him, and replied, "No, sir." Then he added a rider: "But if
you know of such a country, please write and tell me about it. I
know many middle-class Negroes who would book passages there

right away." A ripple of laughter trailed after him.
I had home in the grayness of the early morning when fog
left
clung to the Wimbledon Common as if it had dug sharp claws into

the flesh of the earth. How many hours had I spent with Malcolm?
It seemed as if time had been standing still because, by the time we
reached the LSE, the gray morning and the gray, somber afternoon
looked the same.
While we were waiting backstage in the Old Theatre, I peered
through the curtain and reported, "The room's packed. Students
are sitting in the aisles. After your triumph at Oxford, you're a hit
with these university types."
"I like the intellectual give-and-take at universities, but I'll never
stop seeing the big picture through the eyes of my folk in Harlem.
For, after all my travels, Harlem's my take-off spot on this earth.
Nothing will make me forget the suffering of our folk who endured
all kinds of punishment for no reason other than that they have
black skins. No and no matter if I'm a Muslim,
matter where I go,
Christian, Hindu, atheist, or agnostic, I'll keep on keeping on in
this struggle." He didn't elaborate further, and we said nothing.
We knew that he was gearing himself to face an audience once

again. I wanted to tell him that at home, we call it "beating your
own drum and dancing." What happens is that when a virtuoso on
the drums is about to face an audience, he does a backstage
warm-up. The head of the African Student Society came and told
Malcolm that everything was ready for his appearance. He parted
the curtain and, amidst loud applause, walked to the podium.
From behind the curtain, I could see the white, black, yellow, and
various shades of brown faces looking up at him, and adding an
exotic touch to the gathering was a sprinkling of turbaned heads
like night The murmurs that rose
orchids blooming in the daytime.
and fell after the applause died down were like waves climbing and
retreating up and down a beach at ebb tide. The audience expected
an ebony Savonarola, and what they saw instead was a tall,
elegant, light-skinned Afro-American with gray-green eyes that
appraised them coolly from behind rimless spectacles.
What was significant about this and other forums at which
Malcolm spoke in Britain and France was that African students
were the principal organizers. Everywhere that he had gone in
Africa, young people had come in the hundreds to hear him speak,
and the news about his bold and stirring call for a transatlantic
Black unity had, very quickly, reached the African students

abroad. Then, of course, there were both Black and white students
who were anxious to see the man whom the news media had
transformed into a demon-celebrity.
"Malcolm's a man living life in a hurry," Dermot commented
hoarsely. "He's like a comet burning himself out to light up our
Black world."
Ossie Davis, that splendid Black actor, when asked by a white
editor after Malcolm's death why he admired Malcolm, explained,
"Malcolm kept snatching our lies away. He kept shouting the
painful truth we whites and Blacks did not want to hear from all
the housetops. And he wouldn't stop for love or money."
Ted Joans, the African-American jazz poet, captured the essence
of what Malcolm was in his most fiery days when he wrote:
Malcolm screamed at them

but be spoke softly to me.
Malcolm stripped tbem naked
but he clothed me.
Yet privately, Malcolm, even at the height of his "white devil"

period, was the epitome of courtly manners, of charm and an
Jan Carew 99
innate graciousness. His parents had taught him those good

manners when he was a child, and when he became a Muslim
minister those teachings reasserted themselves.
Sitting in the packed room London School of Economics
at the
and waiting reverently for Malcolm to appear was Michael De
Freitas. He would later call himself Michael X and claim that he
had been chosen by Malcolm X to be his leading apostle in Britain.

The only thing that Michael had in common with Malcolm,
however, was that they had both begun as outlaws in their
respective societies, but here the comparison has to end abruptly.
For once Malcolm became a Muslim and dedicated his life to the
cause of Black liberation, his personal life was austere, ascetic, and
morally irreproachable. Besides, Malcolm, during and after serv-
ing time in prison, had a passion for books and ideas. Michael, in
contrast, remained a creature of instinct, and listening to his
antiracist pronouncements, even when they were, at times, right on
target, one was left with an uneasy feeling as a certain obscuran-
tism crept into the rest of what he had to say. As for his claim to
being a Muslim convert, he in fact never abided by any of the
austere tenets that the Koran prescribes. Instead, he proclaimed
himself to be the leader of a movement that eventually turned out
to be more shadow than substance. He was, however, not without
ability, charm, intelligence, and a West Indian sense of loyalty to
his friends. In fact, he became a leader by default, for in the absence

of militant, fearless, eloquent, and incorruptible grassroots leaders
like Malcolm X, and without a movement like Elijah Muham-
mad's Black Muslims, Michael X did help to dramatize the plight

of immigrants of color in Britain and to prod a reluctant British
government into taking halfhearted steps to deal with racial
discrimination.
Michael X, with his dark prophet's beard highlighting a sallow
complexion, looked like one of those millenarian prophet-priests
that oppressed Black societies occasionally throw up —Boukman
and Mackandal Bedward in Jamaica, Jordan in Guyana,
in Haiti,
Arpeika the Black/Seminole shaman in Florida, and others. What
Malcolm X and his transatlantic imitator Michael X had in
common was an inner rage against white oppression. And this
rage, burning like a flame in secret chambers of their hearts, lent a
mysterious aura of reined-in power to their personalities. Michael

X, enthralled by every word that Malcolm uttered at that LSE
meeting, told me afterward that he had decided there and then to
set up a Black nationalist movement in Britain.
Malcolm began to speak after an introductory encomium in

which he was described as a Joshua, a redeemer, and the most
eloquent spokesman for oppressed Black peoples since Marcus
Garvey. The heightened murmur of voices that greeted his appear-
ance subsided, and he seemed to grow taller under the harsh lights.
No one could have guessed that earlier in the day he'd been
afflicted with flu and that stomach cramps and chills had left him
looking crumpled and wretched. With the exception of a handful

of us, most of those present were seeing Malcolm in the flesh for
the time. Supporters, detractors, and the curious had come to
first
see a Black messianic nemesis figure whom a hostile media had

created. To their surprise, what they saw instead was a smiling,
supremely confident humanitarian who greeted them graciously
and accorded them a respect that their professors seldom did, and
this immediately erased the distorted media images from their
minds. He thanked the Africa Society for inviting him and said that
he had been told that students at the LSE were smart, enlightened,
and noted for giving controversial speakers like himself a hard
time. "I look forward to the verbal contests that will ensue after I
speak," he assured them. He seemed to be speaking off the cuff as

he continued, but his talk was, in fact, structured and balanced,
and the wide range of themes he touched on were interrelated. all
Malcolm carried the American racial situation with him wher-

ever he went. He saw the world through a spectrum of America's
inner cities. His world was one shaped by his experiences in those
inner cities, particularly in Harlem. It was in Harlem that he found

the extended family that had been denied him when he was
growing up. It was there that he was given the love and understand-
ing that he had needed so desperately during the turbulent,
formative decades after his father's tragic death. The women in
Jan Carew 101
Harlem, Black and West Indian alike, became collective surrogate

mothers, and it was through them that he could once again
acknowledge Louise, the mother he had shut out of his life.
Whether he was in Cairo, London, Paris, Accra, Nairobi, or Dar es
Salaam, he was always speaking to the world from a platform in
Harlem.
The opening themes he touched on in his talk at the LSE were
loaded with coded messages to his grassroots constituents in
America's inner cities. The media had noised it everywhere that he
had "changed"; that after his pilgrimage to Mecca he no longer
denounced whites as devils; that he had abandoned Elijah Muham-
mad's Manichean doctrines. The underlying suggestion in these
rumors was that somehow he had "sold out" and betrayed his
"gullible" followers. The grassroots folk were accustomed to hot
gospelers of Black revolution assailing the citadels of white, male
power with incendiary words and then, in a thrice, being co-opted,
neutralized, silenced, or killed. But they trusted Malcolm above all
others. He had an inner ear for their resentments, hopes, and

longings for a better life, and for a world free from the racial
contempt that had been foisted on the backs of slave ancestors and
then on theirs. He was more in tune with the secret rhythms of their
lives than any Black leader had been since Marcus Garvey.
So speaking to that sophisticated audience at the LSE, he was
also sending messages to calm the fears and apprehensions of his
inner-city devotees. He knew and they knew that the media would
automatically misconstrue his words, quote him out of context,
and attribute the basest of motives to his deeds, but they were
skilled at reading between the lines, ignoring the sly, racist innuen-
dos, and drawing their own conclusions.
The enthralled listeners at the LSE did not realize that Malcolm
was at once speaking to them and to a transatlantic audience. He
explained that he was now an orthodox Muslim and that his
religion taught brotherhood. He no longer judged people by the
color of their skin, but, he added, "I have to be a realist — I live in
America, a society which does not believe in brotherhood in any

sense of the term. ... It is a racist society ruled by segregationists."
This harsh and unequivocal statement was addressed to his

followers back home. He was reassuring them that so long as their
condition remained as it was, he would continue to spell out the
truth about it with his down-to-earth metaphors and his trumpet
calls for resistance: "We are not for violence in any shape or form,
but believe that the people who have violence committed against
them should be able to defend themselves."
This was a point he emphasized in every one of his major public
speeches, but here at the LSE, he elaborated on it: "I have never
said that Negroes should initiate acts of aggression against whites,
but when the government fails to protect the Negro he is entitled to
do it himself."
While sending coded messages home, he was also warning the
new immigrants of color in Britain that in white-dominated
societies, they should never rely entirely on laws and statutes for
their protection from racism; that when the agencies of the state are
run by racists, then laws will inevitably be perverted; that being

vigilant and organizing to defend the rights of individuals, families,
and communities is absolutely essential. "Don't wait until they're
getting ready to send you to the ovens," he warned again and
again.
In the midst of issuing dire warnings and telling harsh, unvar-
nished truths, however, he made this predominantly white audi-
ence at the LSE feel at ease. His body language, his charisma, his
utter sincerity, and the glittering intelligence this handsome and

elegantly turned-out man projected was such that no one in that
audience could possibly have felt threatened. He was at times
acerbic,and occasionally his wit flashed like a mirror twisted in the

sunlight.At one point, when he was noting a glaring contradiction
in U.S foreign policy, he declared, "I come from a country that is
busily sending the Peace Corps to Nigeria while sending hired
killers to theCongo." He then suggested that his "African brothers
and sisters" should take another look and see the Peace Corps for
what it really is. "What is it?" a voice from the audience asked, and
with the barest of pauses, Malcolm replied with a broad smile,
"Exactly what it says: Peace Corps —get a piece of your country."
Jan Carew 103
This kind of swift, perfectly timed, and biting repartee struck a

responsive chord in the audience. It was very much in line with the
British debating tradition, and laughter and cheers interrupted
Malcolm's speech for a moment. From this point onward, it was
clear that Malcolm had won over most of the audience.
Dermot and I stood at opposite ends of the stage. Malcolm's
back was turned to us. He held himself erect and stood on one spot
throughout his speech; occasionally we saw his face in profile with
its changing expressions, from wide-mouthed laughter to an ear-
nestness that was so intense he reminded me of a black leopard

about to spring. His eyes, too, never left the audience, searching the
faces before him. He was one of those rare speakers who always
gave his best to his listeners, and through his discourse he took
them into his confidence. He was at different times a teacher, a
storyteller, and a griot. He could use words to distill the collective

griefs of Black people and transform them into hard, crystalline
calls for action. His was an eloquent exercise in Aristotle's cathar-
sisand purging of the spirit as he shifted the collective mood deftly
from the somber to the amused and from the indignant to the sad
and the triumphant.
When he talked about the murder of the three civil rights
—
workers in Mississippi Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman,
and James Chaney, two white, one Black there was a note of —
subdued anger in his voice, and his eyes glittered like diamonds. At
that moment, it once again struck me forcibly that he was willing to
die for beliefs and that, like Patrice Lumumba, he would face his
killers calmly, unflinchingly, and defy them with his last breath.
"When they found the bodies," he declared, "they said that

every bone in the body of the Black one was as if
was broken. ... It
those brutes had gone insane while they were beating him to
death."
His bald, detailed account of the murder of three civil rights
workers and the bombing of a church that resulted in the death of

four children brought tears to some eyes while others flashed with
anger and shame. Then raising strong and elegant hands like
shields on either side of his face, he declared:

It is the African revolution that produced the Black Muslim

movement. It is the Black Muslim movement that pushed
the civil rights movement that pushed the liberals out into
the open ... a people who have no more concern for the
rights of dark-skinned humanity than they do for any other
form of humanity.
I wondered whether Malcolm had seen the tears and the anger in
the eyes fixed on him —
white tears and Black tears, white anger
and Black anger for transatlantic victims of racist violence.
Threading its way through that brilliant speech was a pristine
belief in the "African revolution." This was a declaration of faith
by someone who would not live long enough to see the twists and
turns that revolution would take or the brutal and savage low-
intensity warfare unleashed against whole societies that were
trying to free themselves from the imperialist yoke.
Toward the end of his speech Malcolm the visionary moved
away from parochial moorings into the open seas of world
revolution. "The Black man in the Western Hemisphere," he
declared, "and especially in the United States, is beginning to see
where his problem is not one of civil rights, but it is rather one of
human rights. Once this problem is brought onto the world stage,
then we can join forces with brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia, the
Caribbean, Latin America, and those people in Europe who would
join us to see that our rights are guaranteed, because," he con-
cluded, and his voice was charged with a passionate conviction,
"the oppressed masses of people all over the world . . . are crying
out for action against the common oppressor."
In that last part of his speech, Malcolm gave the clearest
indication of how he had changed and, consequently, how his
worldview had changed. Talking about the new revolutionary role

the "Black man in the Western Hemisphere" was being called on to
play, he was in fact confessing that he'd come a long way from the
simplistic racial nostrums of his earlier Black Muslim period. He
was also outlining the new direction his Organization of Afro-
American Unity would be taking. And implicit in this declaration
Jan Carew 105
was the combination of a Garveyite nationalism and the Pan-

Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Pad-
more, and C. L. R. James and others. He was, in short, affirming,
as they had done before him, that when Africa is free and united,
then Black people everywhere will be treated with respect.
Malcolm was appealing directly to the finest instincts of the
overwhelming majority of young people in the audience. He was
calling on Black people everywhere to unite and stand shoulder to
shoulder with Asians, Latin Americans, and "those people in
Europe, some of whom claim to mean right, [to] do whatever is
necessary to [ensure] that our rights are guaranteed us —not

sometime in the long future, but almost immediately."
These bold statements indicated that he was in the midst of
formulating new political, and economic theories.
social, religious,
The ones that had served him well when he was transforming
Elijah Muhammad's obscure, millenarian movement into a nation-
wide one that was alarming the white power structure were no
longer valid. The theory that Black people should own the small
businesses in their neighborhoods was central to the economic
philosophy of Black nationalism. It is, of course, a perfectly valid
theory. But the theory caged itself in the ghettos and suggested that
in a capitalist system one could have capitalist communes that
could exist largely unto themselves. It became more theology and
wish fulfillment than economic fact. Malcolm had pointed out that
when the people of the inner cities could not have face-to-face
confrontations with absentee owners of businesses in their neigh-
borhoods, they would attack their property instead, that when
those folks were accused of rioting and "destroying their own
neighborhoods," this was false, since the majority were tenants
and itinerants in the inner cities who owned little besides the
clothes on their backs.
But those invisible agents of exploitation —the absentee land-
lords —were actually piggybacking on the bigger capitalists such as
the real estate conglomerates, the food industry, the banks, and so
on. These were the most formidable predators in the capitalist
free-market forests, but their invisibility was more absolute than
that of those riding on their backs. They were screened from the
gaze of have-nots in the ghetto by towering battlements of class,
race, gender, and an elaborate state apparatus.
While he was abroad, Malcolm could see the whole network of
exploitation and not just its strands in the ghettos. His meetings with
heads of state and his long conversations with them had helped him
to see the visceral connections among imperialism, colonialism, and
racism. He also saw clearly that religion, be it Christian, Muslim,
Hindu, Buddhist, or any other, could be used either to anesthetize the
minds of believers or to awaken them to a consciousness of their

power to make the world a better place for everyone.
Malcolm occasionally relieved the intensity with which he ex-
pressed his ideas by a very telling and witty remark. After damning
Martin Luther King, Jr., with faint praise, for example, he declared
that whites should be grateful for the way in which his nonviolent
preachings had been able to hold a restive Black population in check.

However, he cautioned, although there were those who wanted to
believe differently, King was in fact losing control of a potentially
explosive situation. "That is why you're in trouble," he said, smiling

broadly. "You want someone come and tell you that your house is
to
safe, while you're sitting on a powder keg."
The laughter that greeted this statement was both friendly and
spontaneous. I kept thinking as I watched those eager faces in the
audience, "Here's Malcolm giving the white imperialists and

racists hell,and yet this predominantly white audience is simply
lapping it up. Three months earlier, when Malcolm had taken part
in the Oxford Union debate, the same thing had happened."
From my vantage point, I could see a middle-age Black man

sitting in the back row. He had a child in his arms, and the child
was fast asleep. I said to myself, "I wonder if some kind of
he's
informer because the sleeping child could be sedated and would
provide him with a perfect cover. He isn't taking notes, but he
could have a recorder on his person or the child's. The bloke might
even be some kind of assassin. Jesus Christ, Jan, don't be bloody
paranoid!" I kept looking at the man's brown and grizzled face
every now and then, but it told me nothing. He was listening
Jan Carew 107
intently. When others in the audience laughed, the child stirred in

its sleep but the man's face remained masklike and imperturbable.
The laughter, though, made Malcolm pause and wait until it
subsided before he continued.

At the end of the formal question period, Malcolm mingled with
the crowd, shook hands, and answered questions, giving his full
attention to every individual to whom he spoke. Michael De
Freitas had vanished and so had the man with the sleeping child.
Dermot, with his eyes fixed on Malcolm as he conversed with this
or that individual said, "If the brother had asked those white
students to join him at the barricades, the majority of them
would've done so."
"They'd have joined him immediately after he'd spoken," I said,
"but after they had time to think things over, he'd be manning the
barricades alone. Still, one or two people in that crowd will always
remember what he said, and it might change their lives. And then,
perhaps, they'll change the lives of others."
On the way to his next appointment, the flu reasserted itself and
Malcolm slumped down in the backseat of the car.
"I was trying to detect who the British and American agents were
in the crowd," I said, and he perked up. "Did you notice the man
with the child in his arms?" I asked.
"Yes, I spotted him," Malcolm said. "He wasn't an agent, but
there was a white guy sitting a few rows from the back. I recognized
him. He follows me around everywhere."
"A secret agent who isn't Dermot commented.
so secret,"
"They try to intimidate me," Malcolm said, straightening him-
selfand laughing.
"He's pumping up the adrenaline for his next meeting," I told
myself, looking at him in the rearview mirror. "Jesus Lord, the
chap's amazing." Somehow, at that moment I remembered the
simple inscription on Henri Christophe's tomb: "I WILL RISE AGAIN
FROM MY ASHES." And I thought, "The only way they'll be able to
prevent Malcolm from rising again from his ashes would be to let
him live and discredit himself. If they kill him, he's sure to rise from
his ashes again and again."
7Si
M
SEVEN
I was afraid of life and asked myself, what will it be like
when I'm grown up?

—Rigoberta Menchii
/ have forgotten the idle words that people said,
But treasure the day when iron doors swung wide

and I slipped into the heartland of my people.
—Juanita Bell
The biographers of Malcolm X—and their numbers are increas-

ing every year —have never portrayed his Grenadian mother,
Louise Langdon Norton Little, as the remarkable women that she
was. She is, instead, invariably depicted as a distraught, tragic
figurewho after her husband's murder succumbed to madness and
was committed to a mental hospital. From then onward, she
disappears from the pages of history.
When Louise Little is mentioned in the biographies of her
famous son, her life story is more notable for its omissions than for
what is actually told about her. Alex Haley's portrayal in his
Autobiography of Malcolm X is more sympathetic than all of the
others. Nevertheless, even Haley leaves an erroneous impression of
Louise. The persistently maligned "brainless" and "hot-blooded"
109
female of color is one of those sexist cliches that dies hard even in
the minds of its victims. Rufina Wynter, a professor at Stanford
University, once confessed that the first time she saw a true literary
image of herself as a West Indian woman of mixed blood was when
she read Edgar Mittelholzer's novel The Life and Death of Sylvia.
Before the rewarding discovery of the Sylvia in that sensitively
wrought and illuminating novel, she had invariably seen
said, she
women of color as unintelligent, oversexed, and exotic creatures
breathlessly waiting to be used and rejected by white heroes.
Literature, films, and television have provided us with an infinite
number of distorted images of the fictitious and dehumanized
mulatto female. This was part of a rationale used to justify slavery
and its monstrous cruelties. Frederick Douglass, in his brilliant and
moving autobiography, left us an unforgettable record of how
mulattoes, both male and female, had to face a special brand of
and exploitation in the American South. The
malice, spite, hatred,
offspring of white plantation owners and slave women, he said,
were almost invariably treated more harshly than their unmixed
African kin. He himself, he attested, grew up knowing that his
father was the owner of the plantation on which he worked as a
slave. The white wives of the planters, in particular, he said, vented
a special kind of jealous wrath upon the mulatto offspring of their

husbands. Their husbands' infidelities stamped painful and in-
eradicable resemblances on the features, mannerisms, and the very

aura of those mulatto slaves.
When Fidel Castro declared at a rally in Havana, "Even when
we [Cubans] look white, we are all mulattoes," he was, for the first
time, publicly acknowledging that there were ghosts of dark

ancestors in the blood of millions in this hemisphere and that this
was a legacy of slavery, exploitation, and the usurpation of Native
American land. He was also affirming that we must make this a
source of strength, since these ghosts in our blood are there to
remind us constantly that our liberation struggle is complex one
a
in which historical conflicts of race, class, caste, color, and culture
determine both how we see ourselves and how others see us.
The notes I had taken about Louise Little during my chance
Jan Carew 111
encounter with the Grenadian matriarch Tanta Bess and my

conversations with Malcolm X in London would have continued
to languish in my files if I had not taken part in a television show on
the crisis of Black education in Washington, D.C., in 1990.
Paul Lee, a young, indefatigable, and able research scholar, saw
the TV show in Detroit and contacted me through the producer.
Paul, as I was soon to discover, is one of those rare self-educated
individuals whom
one occasionally runs into in Black communi-
ties. After dropping out of college, he devoted his life and personal
resources to collecting invaluable material on Malcolm X and his

worldwide role in the Black liberation struggle. I was a Visiting
Robinson Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature

and History at George Mason University when Paul phoned me. A
few weeks after our conversation, he visited me in Fairfax, Vir-
ginia,and presented me with photocopied pictures of Malcolm X

and me at the Commonwealth Institute reception in London.
Shortly afterward, with the idea of writing a book on Malcolm X
slowly crystallizing in my mind, I was Paul's guest in Detroit for a
few days. During that visit was amazed and profoundly impressed
I
both by the content of the material he had amassed and by the way
he had carefully arranged and meticulously classified the priceless
documents. Seeing the array of research material in his study, a
trained librarian, archivist, or research scholar would have been

envious.
Through Paul, I met Wilfred Little, Malcolm's eldest brother.
Wilfred, I learned afterward, not only was one of Paul's mentors,

he was also the mentor to several generations of Black youth in
Detroit. He was in his early seventies when I met him in 1990, tall,
powerfully built, with the large head and bold features of a

heraldic figure in Moorish Spain. His manner of sitting perfectly
still with his large hands in repose when he spoke stood out in stark
contrast to the restless Malcolm I remembered; Malcolm could
never sit still for long, and his eloquent hands constantly re-
sponded and moved in perfect harmony with the cadences of his

voice. Wilfred was also much darker than Malcolm. "I took after
my father," he told me. "I have his color and his physique. He was
112 GHOSTS I\ OIR BLOOD
the strongest man I ever knew, though, and even in my prime I was
never as strong as he was."
My first serious conversations with Wilfred began when I was a
guest in his house in 1991. They continued later in the year when
he visited me in Bloomington, Illinois. Before launching into
reminiscenses about his mother, Wilfred said, "We're living in a
world of illusions. When I talk to people, I tell them that all the
time. warn them, 'Hey, look, this is a world of illusions, it's a

I
great, big phony world! What you think you see is not really what
you see.' They teach a lot of idealism to students in the best schools,
but when they get out into the real world, they find that it's a whole
different way that things are run out there, that there's a whole lot
of lying, deceiving, cheating, and murder out there. My mother
knew it, and Malcolm knew it. But I'm proud of my family, and
proud that my way made us grow up with
parents in their modest
a self-identity and with pride in what we were. Malcolm continued
the work that my father and mother started. He took their Marcus
Garvey philosophy a step further."
In his quiet avuncular fashion, Wilfred began telling an entirely
different story of his mother's life from the one that the biogra-
phers of Malcolm X had so far penned. "The story of her life was
an epic one," he declared proudly. "The epic began in Grenada,
continued in Canada, and ended here in the States. In all three
countries there are parts of her life waiting to be resurrected.
"She was a small-boned and slender woman, five feet eight
inches tall, and she carried herself well. Because she always held
herself erect, she looked taller, but beside my six-foot-four father
she looked short. She was and had a full head of
also fair-skinned
hair. Her feet, though, were narrow, and she had a time finding
shoes. Yes, she carried herself well, and the springs didn't go out of
her legs until she was past eighty and talking about feet, I —
remember Malcolm's feet and the way he used to walk. With his
tall self, he had what I called a tiger-boy walk. He sure had his own
special way of walking. You could tell from a distance that it was
Malcolm. But my mother didn't simply disappear into a world of
Jan Carew 113
madness after my father's death, so let me try and fill in some of the
missing pieces for you.
"When my father died on September 28, 1931, we were living in
an unfinished house. My father was a master builder, he could do

everything —the foundation work, the plumbing, the roofing, the
plastering — and he could put the finishing touches to a house so
all
that it looked real nice. He literally built our home with his own
two hands. He had to build it one section at a time. Because of his
Garveyite beliefs, nobody would give him a regular job. The whites
said that he was uppity, and there were a lot of frightened Negroes
who grumbled that he and my mother were rocking the boat. But
he was a resourceful man and she was a resourceful woman. He'd
leave home early and walk the roads, going from farm to farm and
offering to do whatever repairs the farm buildings needed and he —
could point out to the farmers where repairs were needed, so those
white farmers would allow him to do that kind of odd-job work for
them. He was good at it, and they had a respect for his skill as a
worker.
"But let me back up a bit. We plowed and planted crops on our
own land and raised most of our own food, so before he home
left
in the mornings, my would take us outside

father and show us
what he wanted us weeds up from between
to do, like getting the
the rows. So before he went on his rounds, each one of us had a job
to do, and my mother would see to it that we did it before he came
back home in the evening. And if they both had to go out, the oldest
child —that's me —
would be in charge. Malcolm was always the
most rebellious of us. As he got older and became more indepen-
dent, he'd find some excuse to go back to the house for something,
and we wouldn't see him again. He'd go and get with his friends in
the city. When my father returned home in the evening, depending
on the season, he'd plow and plant and weed and harvest. Then, bit
by bit, make
he'd was one of
additions to the house. Physically, he
the strongest men I ever knew. My mother, too, worked all day and
well into the night; she made dresses and crocheted gloves for
mostly white women. If my father had continued to live, no telling
GHOSTS IN 01 R BLOOD
what we would have turned out to be, because we were a very tight
family. We worked together, and our parents always had us
working toward some useful goal.
"But my father's death had a devastating effect on our tight
family unit. We were living in Lansing at the time, and I'll always
remember the night he was almost cut in half on the streetcar line.
He had come home after a long day's work and was just about to
settle down for the night when he announced that he was going
back into town to get something he had forgottten. 'Don't go,

Earlie,' my mother pleaded with him, 'I have a strange feeling that
something bad could happen to you out there tonight.' She had a
way of foretelling events, and I don't remember her ever being
wrong. But my father had made up his mind. He put on his jacket
and left saying that he'd be back soon. She ran after him, calling
out, 'Don't go, Earlie! Come back, Earlie!' I can't remember ever
seeing her like that before. Anyway, I stayed with her as usual
while she did her chores, and a couple of hours later we heard a
noise as if someone opened the front door, entered, and walked
upstairs. 'Did you hear your father come in and go upstairs?' my
mother asked. 'Yes, I heard as if someone come in,' I said, but when
she went upstairs and checked, he wasn't there. It wasn't too long
after that that a state trooper came to the door and told my mother
that she should come to the hospital right away because my father
had been seriously injured in an accident.
"So, all of a sudden, my mother was on her own with all those
children and no help from anywhere. Other Black people who lived
in the city looked upon us as being odd because we were always
going against the stream and our parents were always challenging
things that they didn't think were right. My father was always out
there trying to encourage our people to get together and do
something to improve their lives, but they felt that he and my
mother were rocking the boat and that she, in particular, didn't
think the way they did. She didn't like the idea of charity, but all of
a sudden she had no husband, and there was no way with all those
children but to accept charity. The house was unfinished, the
insurance company was saying that my father's death was a
Jan Carew 115
suicide,and the ones who controlled the welfare system were

giving her a hard time, putting undue pressures on her. They
wanted her to sell the house, but she refused. A few of my mother's
West Indian friends did try to help out, but the odds against her
were increasing. She was a very good seamstress. She made all of
our clothes, and then, like I said before, she sewed for mostly white
customers. There were very few Black ones.
"I remember that when we lived in Milwaukee, we had a little
store and a storefront, with an apartment next door. She used the
store to sell her merchandise. Back in those days, the boys wore a
jacket and knickers to match, and the girls wore dresses with
bloomers that came below the dresses. She was brave, and she was
a fighter. She worked harder at her dressmaking after she was
widowed. Young as I was then, I could see that she was tired and
trying to take on too much. I went to school in the daytime and
worked in a general store in the evening to make extra money and
help pay the bills and things, and my mother would say, 'I don't
know what I would do if it wasn't for Wilfred. He doesn't act like
a child anymore. He just takes on responsibility like a man.'
"But what happened was this: there was a phony probate judge
who was more or less in charge, and he put a lot of pressure on my
mother. He wanted to buy the property and leaned on her to sell.
He'd tell her that she couldn't stay on welfare and own that
property, which was untrue. He arranged it so that her monthly
check as a widow would come through him, and every time she
went to collect it he would put more pressure on her to sell the
property. When she realized what he was doing, she started
sending me to collect the check. But this judge's secretary, and I
can't remember his name or hers, would keep telling me that he
wasn't in. So my mother sent me back and said, 'When she tells you
he isn't in, just say that I told you to wait.' So I went back and
waited and other people kept going into his office, so after a while
he came out and handed me the check. Now, he and other officials
began increasing the pressure on her and saying that she needed to
go into an institution. I took her to a psychiatrist myself. He was
white, and I can't remember his name either. I asked him to
examine my mother and tell me what was going on. He made an

appointment to see her on a Saturday, and I took her to him, and he
spent some time with her, and the next day he came and said, 'She
needs proper rest and nutrition. If there's someone who could take
over her responsibilities for a while so that she could get the proper
nutrition and not be responsible for anyone, she'd be all right in a
little while.' But there wasn't anyone."
Perhaps because, even now, telling the story of his mother's
journey in and out of a psychological Gethsemane is still too
painful, Wilfred left out details about the symptoms of her immi-
nent nervous breakdown, which he certainly must have witnessed.
Why else would he have accompanied her to a psychiatrist? His
mother's inexplicable withdrawal into a safe, private world of
fantasies and dreams and the changes in her behavior must have
bewildered and traumatized not only Wilfred, but also Malcolm
and the other Little siblings. The anguish this engendered would
have been exacerbated in their young minds when their mother
was summarily committed to a mental hospital, while they were
consigned to different foster homes.
After surviving twenty-five years of forced confinement, Louise
Littlewas rescued by Wilfred, Malcolm, and other family members.
She went to live with her daughter Yvonne in a small country town
named Woodland in upper Michigan. She died there in 1991 at age
ninety-one. "So she survived Malcolm by twenty-six years, and
during that period she enjoyed a normal and peaceful existence, but
nobody seems to take that into account when writing about her life,"
Wilfred explained. In 1993, after visiting Grenada for the first time,
he said, "Perhaps someday her remains can finally be laid to rest at
La Digue, where she was born and where she grew up."
As my conversations with Wilfred continued, images of Louise
Little as a tragic, victimized female faded and bold new ones
portrayed her as a complex, heroic, strong-willed, and intelligent
Grenadian woman who, despite all of the tragedies that had
befallen her, played a vital role in shaping the character of her
children."During the years between childhood and early youth,"
Wilfred said, "my mother and father, who were both staunch
Jan Carew 117
Garveyites, handed to all of their children a sense of racial pride.

She had a better formal education than my father did, but they both
had a respect for learning. She told me that she'd attended an
Anglican school in Grenada and that the teachers believed that
sparing the rod spoiled the child. So she passed on to us some of the
strictnessfrom her own upbringing, just like my father did from
his. They had to teach us how to survive in a hostile white world,
and now I can understand why they had to be strict. But in addition
to drilling her in the three R's as if her life depended on it, my
mother's Grenadian teachers taught her to recite poetry and helped
her develop a love for words. My mother constantly dinned into
our heads that a good education offered the best chance for us to
make something worthwhile of our lives."
Wilfred could sit as still as a Native American shaman, and I
thought, "He never gestures with his hands they way Malcolm did.
How different the two are! Even after a short time in his presence,
you can see how all his life he has had to be cautious, disciplined,
dedicated, and absolutely responsible." He reminded me of a wise
old elephant who always tests bridges before crossing them. There
was a chuckle in his voice when he continued:
"Every day when we came home from school, my mother would
sit us down and have us read aloud passages from Marryshow's
paper The West Indian. Marryshow was her countryman and
somebody she boasted about all the time. He and Garvey were her
two idols. Marryshow, a Black Grenadian, could write the English
language with more polish and, at the same time, tell you more
about the world situation than all those white reporters writing in
Anyway, when we were doing our
the Detroit papers put together.
homework, was always a dictionary on the table, and when
there
we mispronounced a word my mother made us look it up and learn
both to spell and to pronounce it correctly. By reading that
Marryshow paper day after day, we developed reading and writing
skills superior to those of our white classmates. By reading
Garvey's paper and Marryshow's paper, we got an education in

international affairs and learned what Black people were doing for
their own betterment all over the world."
Wilfred then mentioned quite casually that Garvey had visited

their home on several occasions and that his mother had told him
that one of the aides who accompanied him was a cousin of hers.
"I remember this aide of Garvey's accompanying him wherever
he went, and I'm sure, from the way he looked, that he must have
had some East Indian blood in him," Wilfred said. "But I can never
forget that when Marcus Garvey was on the run from the FBI, my
mother hid him in our house and wrote letters and dispatches for
him. She was an educated woman who could write clearly and
well; and several times, she received letters from the leaders of the
movement thanking her for the work she had done and praising
her for her devotion to the cause."
Wilfred recalled that regardless of how onerous and demanding
his mother's daily chores were, and they were indeed daunting, she
always found time to supervise their homework. After her husband
was murdered by the Klan, however, for a while she became
stricter than ever.
"As a widow with eight mouths to feed
— " Wilfred began, and
then, without finishing the sentence, he declared, "Keeping the
family together was always uppermost in her mind. As things got
worse, became an obsession." Once again, he did not continue,
this
but I had heard enough. The picture he had drawn of his mother had
already brought her to life for me. The burst of strictness was part of
a desperate bid to teach last-minute lessons in survival to her children
before a concatenation of pressures overwhelmed her.
Wilfred then emphasized a point that the biographers of Mal-
colm have ignored: "Although the family was broken up, my
mother's early teachings stayed with us. I always remember that
she didn't like to live in the city, and my father didn't like it either.
Whenever we lived in a big city, during the summer, once school

was out, my father would always take us to the country. We would
stay on farms with friends, sometimes spending a month or so
there. They wanted us to be exposed to country life and to get to
know about nature. My mother liked to take us out into the woods
and show us different herbs and tell us what they could cure
she'd teach us things about nature that we would never learn about
Jan Carew 119
in the city. me have a better understanding of the world

This helped
I lived in. —
Another thing when we were living in Wisconsin, she
was always a welcome guest on a nearby Indian reservation. The
Indians treated her like one of their own, and she'd sit with them
and join them in singing their chants. I know that she spent time
with the Caribs in Grenada, so this was just connecting her to an
experience from her past."
As I spoke to Wilfred, it became increasingly clear that the story of

his mother's life in Grenada, despite all of its intriguing omissions,
had, with advancing years, loomed larger and larger in his imagi-
nation. This was only natural, since, as the eldest in the family, he
had been her principal confidant after her husband's death.
After his visit to Grenada in 1993, Wilfred confessed that the
journey to his mother's homeland had been one of the most
important and rewarding in his life. That visit, he said, helped him
to gather fragments from stories of her early life that she had told
him over the years and to piece them together as he had never been
able to do before.
One of the highlights of his visit was when his Grenadian hosts
took him to the spot on which his great-grandmother's house had
once stood. All traces of what had once been the family home for
three generations, however, were erased by time, neglect, hurri-
canes, and successive growth of and yet it was
tropical vegetation,
in that vanished house that his mother was born and it was there
that she had grown up. Apart from stating the bald facts about that
historic visit, Wilfred told me nothing about how he felt while
looking at that vacant, overgrown plot of land. A few months later,
however, he confessed that he would like to have his mother's
ashes returned to Grenada and buried on that spot, so that
although the house was no longer there, the memory of this place
where she had and played and dreamed her first dreams
lived
would be kept alive. For Malcolm, her world-renowned fourth
son, was the inheritor of those dreams, and he had immortalized

them with his enchanted tongue and his legendary courage. Mak-
ing that spot a hallowed one would also complete the transatlantic
ellipsis inside of which Malcolm, his redoubtable father, and his

fearless mother had taken part in an epic struggle for human rights
and human dignity.
When he returned from Grenada, Wilfred commented with a
chuckle that although he already knew that Malcolm was greatly
admired abroad, the extent of this admiration nevertheless had
astonished him. He had become more conscious of the negative

also
side of the adulation that his famous brother enjoyed at home and
abroad, since there seemed to be more and more detractors and

idolators alike, claiming that they were blood relatives or friends of
friends supposedly privy to the most intimate secrets of the Little
family. With a slow smile and a deprecating wave of the hand,

Wilfred said, "From time to time, folk in Lansing will call and tell me
that some kind of critter is running around town asking a lot of
questions about our family. I remember that a few years ago, there
was one, in particular, who they said was writing a book, and all he
wanted to hear was something derogatory. If they told him some-
thing good, he didn't want to hear it. Well, when you omit our good
deeds and brave deeds and positive achievements, we become
accustomed to seeing ourselves as being powerless and without any
real human identity, so if by running down someone like Malcolm,
some little person can strut and shine for a moment, there's always
room for him or her to jump at the chance to do this, and this applies
to folks in Grenada just like it does to folks here."
An American biographer of Malcolm X who
was obviously
unaware of the complexity of social customs in West Indian
society, wrote somewhat prissily that Louise's mother had had
three children out of wedlock. The implication was that this
showed a terrible flaw in her character. Although Louise was
definitely not the child of common-law parents, it should have
been pointed out that the term "out of wedlock" is largely
meaningless unless one is talking about the elites or the "respect-
able" lower middle class in West Indian society. The majority of
West Indians do not regard "illegitimacy" as something to be
excoriated. The fact is that a significant percentage of West Indian
children born "out of wedlock" are the offspring of parents living
Jan Caren 21
in stable common-law family units. Governments in the English-

speaking Caribbean, therefore, have been forced to change the
laws of inheritance to deal more fairly and compassionately with
this all-pervasive reality. In local Grenadian parlance, it is said
of couples living in common-law unions that "they're married but
not churched." Since Catholicism is the main religion of the island
and the priests declare that all unions between men and women
must be sanctified by marriage, Grenadians strike a compromise
with the Almighty by constantly affirming that at some time in the
distant future they "intend" to have their marriage "churched." A
working-class Grenadian will describe his or her common-law
partner as "my intended."
Louise Langdon's white father, however, in his blatant exploita-
tion of her Creole mother, was merely exercising his semifeudal
droit de seigneur —the right of the Bushas, the Buckras, the scions
of the planter class to use women for their carnal satisfaction and
then to discard them. In Louise's time, too, the Bushas in Grenada
were not only white, they also had brown or black imitators.
Where the darker-skinned Bushas were concerned, their status as
professionals, high-ranking civil servants, landowners, or busi-
nessmen could "whiten" them.
Because emigration from Grenada had been a necessity in the
past and remains so to this day, both close and distant relatives in
Louise's extended family are now scattered across three continents.
The stories of her growing up in rural Grenada are, therefore,
fragmented and dispersed across the Caribbean and in Latin
America, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. All of those
who knew her as a child growing up in La Digue, however, are now
dead, and memory plays strange tricks when it is filtered from one
generation to the next. But the oral tradition is still alive in
Grenada, and a fortunate but purely accidental meeting in Bacolet
with a venerable matriarch confirmed this. She had introduced
herself by saying, "I am Mistress Bessie Roumain from La Digue,
but everyone calls me Tanta Bess, and that's what you can call me,
young man." It is the custom in rural Grenada that when people
introduce themselves, they tell you their name and the place where
they were born, because their umbilical cord is buried in that

particular village, hamlet, or town, bonding them there to a sacred
spot on earth for life.
"La Digue? Isn't that where Malcolm X's mother grew up?" I
asked.
"That's where Louise Langdon was born," she confirmed. I
already knew that she and Louise had grown up together. Someone
had told me so, and that was why I had asked a friend to take me to
her house in the hills. Once I had befriended her and allayed her
suspicions, she began to talk to me freely about Louise and her
family. must confess, though, that talking to a number of other
I
folk, I often recalled Oscar Wilde's quip about the Irish, and I
couldn't help concluding with the same perceptive cynicism of that

Irish wit that Grenadians too are a very honest people: they never
speak well of one another.

In 1979, when I lived in Grenada, there were still older folk who
could talk about Louise and her Langdon, Orgias, Norton, and
other relatives as if she had only left the island recently. At that
time, however, Louise had already migrated, first to Canada and
then to the United States, over half a century ago. But in the oral
tradition, time is compressed so that past happenings, embroidered
with gossip, imaginative speculation, and a sprinkling of truths,
can be highlighted and dramatized. Tanta Bess told her tales with a
sense of conviction and an unusual memory for significant details
that left no doubt about the authenticity of her recollections. She
always sat in a rocking chair in a room dappled with sunlight and
shadows, and she brought the past back to life more vividly than
photograph albums, notes, and diaries could have done for me. As
she spoke, a great-grandchild would occasionally run into the
room and shoo an Whenever I looked away
errant chicken away.
from Tanta Bess's lined, nutmeg-brown face, her white hair, and
shrewd, glittering eyes, my eyes lighted on the mango and cherry
trees in her front yard. Every now and then, when her voice trailed
off into a hoarse whisper, I leaned forward to hear what she was
saying, and I also heard the sound of one of the plump, blood-red
cherries falling to the ground or the muted conversation of birds
Jan Carew 123
echoing inside the room. Because of the way in which she spoke to
me at first, I could not help concluding that in her silent rumina-
tions she had grown accustomed to past events flashing across her
mind, not in chronological order, but according to her mood at a
particular moment. So her answers to my questions conformed to

her own eccentric patterns of thought. Although I'd explained at
our first meeting why I was interested in the story of Louise
Langdon's childhood and youth in Grenada, for a week or so, after
greeting me and placing a bowl of fruit in front of me, she would

ask, "Why you so interested in Louise Langdon?" And knowing
that village folk literally find it impossible to detach someone from
the web of an extended family, I'd repeat respectfully:
"She had a famous son, and how can you know the truth about
a son or daughter without first finding out who their mother was,
and who her family and her husband's family were?"
After my third visit, her suspicions were finally allayed, and,
rocking gently back and forth, she smiled and said, "I'm glad you
come to keep an old lady company. Everybody busy these days,
running around like chickens without a head. They never have time
to listen." After a pause, she continued, "Yes, Louise was my
friend. Granny Langdon, her grandmother, that is, used to tell
everybody who had ears to hear that she warned Louise's mother
to stay away from Norton, that hit-and-run white man who was
sweet-talking her, but the young, own-way woman had hard ears,
and she didn't listen. That good-for-nothing Norton man was a big
shot on the island, and his eye used to catch fire for colored
women. So he well scattered his seed all over the place and leave
befuddled women to live with the fruits of his misdeeds. Louise's
mother, may was so bent on having her own
her soul rest in peace,
way Granny Langdon's warnings. The
that she turned deaf ears to
good Lord blessed and cursed the women in that Langdon family
with good looks and minds of their own. But one thing I can say
about them, they didn't have a snobbish bone in their bodies,
although Louise's mother was a brown woman like me. Because of
the white man's blood in her veins, Louise looked like a Mung-
Mung, they didn't ever make believe, in fact or fancy, that they
124 GHOSTS IN (MR BLOOD
were something that they were not. Like my family, they weren't
poor, but they weren't rich either. They were comfortable, though,
and didn't have to scratch and scrounge for a living. If Louise
wanted to play white, she had the color and hair to do it, but, even
if it wasn't in her nature to do stupidness like that —
and to tell you
—
the God's truth, it wasn't that grandmother of hers wouldda put
a stop to that kind of behavior from the start. It still have plenty
foolishness in this place. Take the matter of hair. Stupid people will
say that there is good hair and bad hair, but what I say is this:
there's obedient hair and unruly hair. Hair that can give a comb a
hard time is obedient hair, the strongest wind can't blow it all over
the place, water can't paste it to your skull and block your vision
with it, and no matter how hard you shake your head, it will stay in
place
—
"What was Louise's mother like?" I asked, interrupting her.
"How you mean? What she looked like or what she was as a
woman?"
"Both."
"She died when was too young to remember, but my mother
I
told me that she was a good looker, with color and good hair.
Musta had some coolie blood in her, or Carib in addition to the tar
brush, she said, though she wasn't sure exactly which one. Mother
and daughter, though, were cut from the same cloth of wayward-
ness. But Granny Gertrude Langdon brought Louise up with a
strict hand. Now that was a woman with a wise head on her
shoulders!"
"Who?" I asked, because as the words flowed from her lips she
seemed to assume that I was already intimately acquainted with all
of the people about whom she was speaking.

"Grandmother Langdon, of course," she chided me and contin-
ued without a pause. "She was always warning Louise: 'Don't
grow up to be like your mother, girl, she was too trusting and
sweet-talking men advantaged her!' Another thing I remember is
this: she always used to refer to Louise's father as 'that hit-and-run

sailor man' although Norton had left the sea years ago and settled
down as a planter."
Jan Carew 125
"Didn't the two of you go to the same school?" I asked, because

an old man from La Digue had told me so.
"The same school, yes, and we sat side by side on the same
bench. Every day Louise turned up with her school uniform
starched and stiff as buckram, and clean, but by afternoon she'd be
going home with her clothes all rumpled up. She could run deer
speed, and we used to play rounders and hopscotch and climb up a
mahogany tree in the school yard. You know how many times that
girl get me in trouble? More times than I can count. We used to
take a shortcut home, pelt the cows, tease the ram-goats, chase the
fowls —we got plenty
— beatings for that
wild, tomboy behavior, but
that didn't stop us
"Was she bright?"
"Bright? She was brighter than all of us, but she didn't settle
down to studying until her grandmother started watching her like
a hawk and paying Teacher Ansel to give her private lessons after
school. Teacher Ansel was from Dominica, and he was part Carib.
I
—
never could " Her voice trailed off, but I encouraged her to
continue, saying, "So she did better at school after this teacher
began giving her private lessons? Her grandmother must've been
fairly well off then, to afford those lessons? Did Norton help in any
way while she was growing up?"
She replied impatiently, "I told you already that Granny Lang-
don wasn't rich and that she wasn't poor either. And as for that
Norton man, this island too small for Louise not to have met him
face to face. Granny Langdon was proud, and she owned land;
besides, she had relatives in Canada who sent her money." After an
uncomfortable pause, she closed her eyes and reflected aloud, "On
the way home, me and Louise used to sing out the poetry we learnt
by heart from the Royal Reader."
"Do you remember the poems?" I asked. Tanta Bess opened her
eyes wide. "Of course I remember them!" was her indignant
rejoinder, and without further ado she recited excerpts from
different poems; "The cottage was a thatched one, the outside old
and mean, yet everything within that cot was wondrous, neat and
—
clean The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had
fled —Oh, Mary go and home, and call the cattle

call the cattle
—
home across the sands of Dee There were maidens in Scotland
more lovely by far who would gladly have wed the young Lochin-
var. . .
."
The Royal Reader was a standard text in schools all over the
British Empire. It had been replaced by more modern and relevant
texts decades ago, but the old woman still remembered those
disparate lines from poems that she and Louise had to learn by
heart in elementary school.
"So you both liked to read and to recite poems?"
"With the kind of teachers we had, we didn't have any choice. It
was wild cane on your back like fire if you didn't know those poems
by heart! But Louise was also a champion for making up stories. The
story of hers that I will always remember is this one: She would make
up a tale 'bout how her real father was a prince who sailed the seas
and how wicked strangers captured him, but someday he was going
to escape and come back to Grenada to claim her as his daughter. I
had a father when I was growing up, but she didn't, so she was
creating a make-believe one to replace that good-for-nothing Norton
man. Because the children at school would tease her by asking 'Who
is your father, Louise?' But the ones who asked her that had to look
out, because that girl had a temper, and when that temper rise up in
her, she wasn't afraid of God or man." She switched from this topic
to an even more melancholy one, without a pause, "When Grand-

mother Gertrude went to meet her Maker, Louise lived for a while
with an aunt who wasn't anywhere as good to her that old lady was,
but we were still best friends, and I went to visit her often. She was
living near a group of Caribs, and this I remember, Teacher Ansel
was related to them."
"Who, the Caribs?"
"Yes."
"What happened to Ansel?"
"He became a soldier-boy . . . joined the West Indian Regiment
and went to fight the Turks in some Jesus Christ Bible land. He
never came back, and I don't know if he lived or if that war cut his
life short."
Jan Carew 127
"Sounds as if Ansel was a sweet-boy," I said, pulling her leg, and

she smiled and confessed, "He was a douglab [a mix of African and
Amerindian] big and strapping and handsome
. . . Louise . . .
always said that if she was a man she'd have joined up too, just to
get away from the small-minded Grenadian people."
I changed the subject, convinced that Tanta Bess was using
Louise's name to express her own ire with small-minded Grenadi-
ans.
"Tell me something? Did Louise's mother die giving birth to
her?"
"No, she went to meet her Maker a little time afterwards. But my
mother told me that when the poor woman was heavy with child,
she used go by the seaside all by herself, and sometimes she would
get really vexed and curse Norton out loud so that the wind could
carry her words to him. My mother said that there was fire inside
her even though sickness was wracking her young body. Granny
Gertrude used to say that her daughter fought like a Trojan to stay
alive for the sake of her one-child, but she lost the fight."
"So Louise didn't have any brothers or sisters?"

"She had cousins and half-brothers and half-sisters, because of
Norton's wild ways. But as for brothers and sisters of her own, she
had none."
"Do you remember when she left Grenada?"
"Yes. The war was still on."
"You mean World War I?"
"Yes, that one. German submarines were sinking ships like peas.
But her uncle Langdon sent for her, and she was glad to leave the
aunt who wasn't as nice to her as Granny Gertrude was. She wrote
to me a few times."
"Did you keep the letters?"
"Don't you know that it's bad luck to keep letters?"
"Why?" I asked, but she brushed my question aside with a
dismissive wave of the hand and said, "I remember how the first
letter said that when she boarded the ship, they wanted to put her
with the white people, but she told them that she was a Creole and
that she preferred to travel with home folks who she could chat
with and be at her ease. Then she wrote how all the way up, they
had lifeboat drills, and after those drills was hard for her to fall
it
asleep because she'd get nightmares that she was drowning and
that the ship was her coffin. I still remember that part of her letter,
because I read it over and over again before I burn it. I never set
eyes on Louise after she left for Canada. I heard that she married a
Yankeeman — a black one — but she never came home again."
Ihad noticed that when Tanta Bess spoke about her school days,
she'dcome alive and shed years as she spoke, so I said, "Tell me
more about the school you and Louise attended." She smiled and
launched into recollections of those salad days immediately.
"Our school was next door to the Anglican church. From first to
sixth standard, the classes were separated by rows of benches. The
schoolmaster always walked around with a wild cane in hand. The
people in La Digue treated him like if he was God Almighty,
though. He was like the schoolmaster in the poem we had to learn
by heart
—
"Which one was that?" I asked, but instead of replying directly,
she recited:
And still they gazed

and still the wonder grew
that one small head
could carry all he knew . . .
Then she continued: "We feared that schoolmaster like how

chicken 'fraid of chicken hawk. That mind where he man didn't
slashed you with that wild cane. It used to leave more marks on
Louise's fair skin than on my brown one, but she was brave like a
Carib and would bite her lip till she could taste blood rather than
cry. Two things I will remember 'bout Louise for as long as I have
breath in mi'body. One is when her grandmother passed away, and

she had to go and help to bathe and dress the body. That was the
first time she had to see the dead and touch a dead body, and it
upset her a lot. She said that her grandmother looked so small and
cold, and she couldn't stop talking about it. She said that it wasn't
Jan Carew 129
that it made her afraid of the dead, it just made death too familiar
and ordinary."
"What's the other thing you remember?" I asked.
"An old Carib woman told her that she was going to have to face
five sorrows in her and that she'd already faced two of the
life,
five—the loss of her mother and Grandmother Gertrude's pass-

ing — that left three others."
"That old Carib woman seems to have missed a few. There was
her husband's murder, the breakup of her family, the authorities
having her committed to a mental hospital, and her son's assassina-
tion." There was a touch of irony in my voice as I said this, and she
asked sharply, "You don't believe in these things, do you?"
"Whether it was prophecy or coincidence, the tragedies did
happen," I parried defensively. She shook her head sadly and
looked toward heaven, as though making a silent plea to the
Almighty to have mercy on me for my irreverence.

"What do you remember?" I asked. She smiled, raised her
else
clasped her hands to her chin, and said, "We used to sneak out at
night and try and see the Ligaroo moving like a ball of fire the devil
pelted across the swamps and cow pastures."
"Did you ever see the Ligaroo?" I asked, trying to pull her leg,
because this legendary African and Amerindian spirit of fire was an
important demon
figure in Grenadian folklore.
"If I do you think I'd be here to tell the tale?"
did,
"It's a pity you didn't keep those letters from Louise. They
would be very valuable now."

She shrugged. "I told you what Louise had written in her first
letter to me. What more do you want?" she asked peevishly and
continued, "She said that over there, she had to make a choice
between being Black or white."
"Yes, up there, you have to choose."
"That Yankeeland too complicated for my old brain to under-
standit. That's why I never wanted to live anywhere else but right
here."
"Do you know that when Louise went to Montreal to stay with
her uncle Edgerton Langdon, she became a Garveyite?"
"Well, white as she was, you would've expected her to turn her
back on Black people. But not the Louise I knew. No, sir. She had
too much gumption and pride. Fair-skinned as she was, she always
saw herself as a Grenadian Creole woman. That's who she was
when he left here, and that's who, I'm sure, she'd remain right up to
the day she goes to meet her Maker."
My father, Charles Alan Carew, and his fair-skinned sister (they
were children by the same parents) had traveled to Montreal in
1917, the same year in which Louise Langdon had done so. When
I was in my early teens, I remember him telling me jokingly that
once they were on board the ship, my aunt was assigned to a cabin
for whites only, while he had to be content with one close to the
steerage. My aunt objected to being separated from her brother,
and she was relegated to a "for natives of color only" section.
When Louise boarded that ship for Canada, she too was called
upon, for the first time in her life, to choose between being white or
colored, and she also made the choice unhesitatingly. Both my aunt
and Louise had been brought up in similar rural, middle-class,
colonial settings where they were thoroughly Creolized. They had
made this choice even though the infinite gradations of class, color,
caste, and status in their village societies were full of subtleties and
complications. My aunt, who lived to ninety-eight, was never fully
integrated into theNorth American society and its culture of racial
discrimination, and after working as a nurse for forty-five years she
returned to Barbados to live out the final decades of her life.
Louise, however, was integrated into American society through her
uncle, her husband, her children, and her commitment to the
struggle for Black liberation.
It was during the turbulent aftermath of World War I that my
father mentioned in a letter to his sister that Garvey's philosophy of
Black pride, African liberation, and the return of the sons and
daughters of the African diaspora to their ancestral motherland
began to create seismic rumblings throughout the Black world, The
tremors of that Garveyite movement and its aftershocks affected
Jan Carew 131
Black people not only in Canada and the United States but also in
the Caribbean, Central and South America, Africa, and Europe.
Louise first heard of Marcus Garvey from her Uncle Edgerton
Langdon. In 1916, a year before she immigrated to Montreal, he
had traveled to New York to visit friends in Harlem, and they had
taken him to a meeting in St. Mark's Hall to hear Garvey speak.
That meeting had marked a turning point in his life, and he began
to spread the Garveyite message soon after his return to Montreal.
It won a sympathetic response from members of the Black commu-
nity. That message has reverberated for three-quarters of a century,
for today there is still a functioning chapter of Garvey's United
Negro Improvement Association in Montreal. Louise Langdon
Little, her uncle Edgerton Langdon, her husband Earl Little, as
Garveyite devotees and new converts, laid the foundation on
which all the succeeding Black Power movements in Canada and
the United States were built.
Louise met Earl Little at a Garvey conference in Montreal. No
one knows how long their courtship lasted. However, they were
married in Montreal on May 10, 1919, two years after Louise
arrived in Canada. In just over a decade of that marriage, Louise
had seven children by Earl Little. Wilfred was the eldest, and there
followed Hilda, Philbert, Malcolm, Reginald, Yvonne, and
Robert. The May 1919 marriage certificate confirms some interest-
ing facts about Louise's early Her maiden name is recorded as
life.
Louise Norton, even though she had been known as Louise

Langdon all of her life. Norton, in fact, was the name recorded on
her birth certificate, but Grandmother Gertrude Langdon had
followed an Afro-Carib matriarchal tradition in which the
mother's lineage is regarded as the only valid one. However, the
Norton name on the birth certificate could have been legally
changed only by deed poll, and this would have required the
father's consent. Given Gertrude Langdon's pride in her family
name and her contempt for Norton, she had obviously chosen to
avoid asking Norton for his consent. As Louise's guardian, she had
simply given the child her own and her mother's surname.
Louise Langdon Norton spent two years in Canada, and during

that time, a distant Canadian relative told me, she did odd jobs as
a shop assistant and a domestic. Her ability to speak French and
her fair complexion, the informant told me, obviously helped her
to find work. These years, however, were crucial in shaping the rest
of her life North America. But in the rush to embroider details in
in
the life of her famous son, biographers have ignored or passed over
many events that shaped her life and, through her, Malcolm's life.
But there is also the fact that Louise arrived in Canada already
steeped in the lore, the magic, the complex village culture of La
Digue, with its codes of morality and its tradition of loyalty to
family and place.
Stepping off the gangplank of the ship that brought her to
Montreal, Louise must have seen that in her journey from La Digue
she had, in fact, not only sailed thousands of miles north, but had
also leaped across centuries. My father, my aunt, and Louise
Langdon, coming from their villages in and seeing a
the sun
metropolis like Montreal for the first time, must have viewed it
with the same wonder. They must have felt the same apprehension
about where they would find a human sanctuary in the midst of the
city's monuments in stone and its towering buildings. For the first
time, too, they must have been conscious of being dwarfed, not by
cliffs, mountains, and forests but by man-made structures. But they
would have brought an invincible certainty of who they were as

human beings and instinctively they would have looked not so
much at the structures but at the kaleidoscope of human faces
around them. A would have
smile, a nod, a friendly greeting
reassured them that they were still in a human world in which they
were living beings. However, people moved around like ciphers
and the sound of machines muted their voices. As they entered the
intestines of the city, the streets would have grown wider and the
buildings taller, more impersonal.
Just as West Indian friends and relatives came to my father and

aunt's rescue with their lively good humor, their volumes of advice,
Jan Carew 133
and their eagerness to hearnews from home, Louise's uncle and his
friends would have subjected her to the same welcoming ritual.
Soon after my father and aunt's arrival, my father got a job with
the Canadian Pacific Railway, while she, traumatized by the cold
and the daunting business of finding her way in a labyrinth of city
streets, left for Tulsa, Oklahoma. She complained that the icy wind
in those canyoned streets made her feel as if she were breathing in
splinters of glass. She had relatives in Tulsa, and they had arranged
a job in a hospital for her.
Louise survived the crossing much better than my aunt did.
Although there is no record of her having done so, she must have
worked in Montreal soon after her arrival. What is obvious,
however, is that staying with her uncle, she had a crash course in
the crucial basics of survival in a society in which the format of
institutional racism was entirely different from the one in her
semifeudal Grenadian society.
In retrospect, it is compare my father's reaction to
interesting to
racism in Montreal with that of Louise and her uncle. His art was
his life, and he felt that the most effective way of answering those
who sought to denigrate him because of his color was through his
paintings and sculpture. Louise, on the other hand, deeply influ-
enced by her grandmother's teachings and politicized by her uncle,
entered the fray directly, and by the time she had married an
activist in the Garvey movement they were fully aware of the risks
involved in joining the Black liberation struggle.

In a profound sense, both my father and Louise had committed
their lives and creative energies to the dangerous cause of freeing
the souls of Black folk from the thralldom of racial indignities and
white contempt. His spirit was crushed slowly and remorselessly
by indifference, while hers was mangled by violence, murder, and
constant persecution.
EIGHT
We are the avengers of death. Our race will never be
extinguished while there is light in the morning star.
— Popol Vuh
my final
A month had gone by
conversations with him, and
neglecting to post
since Malcolm's LSE speech and
my habit of writing letters and
them had caught up with me. As a result, I was
left with a long letter that I had penned to Malcolm but had not
mailed.
For me, writing letters has always been a painful chore. It's how
I imagine a postman feels about going for a walk after a long day of
trudging from door to door with a heavy mailbag. My letters are
never like the chatty, amusing, and lighthearted ones I often receive
from friends. Mine are invariably long, and my incurable habit of
storytelling turns them into a kind of anecdotal essay. It is either
this or a businesslike ten-line missive.
Having written this letter to Malcolm and put it aside, I was glad
that I'd never posted it because it would have arrived after he was
assassinated and would most likely have been intercepted. Looking
at my letter, I often speculated about the fate of letters from all over
the world that must have been written to Malcolm and posted
while he was alive but that had arrived after his death. Some of
still
those letters must have eventually reached his wife and the sister
135
who had taken over the leadership of the OAAU, but others are
most likely languishing in some secret archive where the passage of
time will render them meaningless.
There was also the strange phenomenon that occurs when a
relative or friend dies in another country and you don't actually see
the corpse or attend the funeral. A vague feeling lingers in your
mind that somehow the person is permanently suspended in a
twilight zone between the world of the and that of the dead.
living
Rereading my unposted letter more than two decades later, I
could not help thinking of the hundreds of intimate questions I
would like to have asked Malcolm. For despite our lengthy

conversations, we had both avoided revealing an infinite number
of fears, doubts, macabre fantasies, and private longings. Iwould
have had to play Boswell to his Johnson for a number of years in
order to plumb depths that the short time of our acquaintance had
never allowed us to do. In retrospect, I'm particularly sorry that we
didn't talk about the women in his life, because the way in which
men in general, but Black men in particular, talk about women
when no females are within earshot tells you a great deal more
about the men themselves than about the women they're discuss-
ing. I'd been tempted several times to ask Malcolm about his days
as an outlaw and about how his being a father and loving husband
squared with his decision to die for the cause he believed in so
passionately. But I never had the chance.
58 Ridgeway Place
London SW 19
Dear Malcolm,
Your visit was all too short, but folks speak about you as though
you'd never left. During our talks, so much was left out, and before
we parted you'd asked mehadto write. I the distinct impression
and your two recent visits to
that one of the results of our meeting,
Britain, is that you're keen on finding out more about the West
Indian side of your family history. There are a lot of Grenadians
Jan Carew 137
here in Britain, and I've already asked some of the older folk
among them to find out what they can about your mother's family.
You also asked me to tell you more about my own family
background, so I'll do that in some detail for you.
But let me begin with current events. I gave up the editorship of

Magnet shortly after your departure. The moment the chaps who'd
put up the funds to launch the paper saw that it was a success, they
went behind my back and tried to sell it to a large corporation.
Such are the foibles of the Black struggle! Pious rhetoric in public,
greed and betrayal in private!
You'll notice from the enclosed copy that they attacked you in
the first issue after I left. They're trying to suck up to the white
establishment, but they're doing it in such a sleazy fashion that no
one's taking them seriously. They don't seem to realize that Uncle
Toming from the heart has to be done according to established
rules, the first and most important being that you must not appear
to be doing it. A group of us had formed a cooperative, and we

tried to buy Magnet, but we couldn't raise enough money. What a
pity! The dark million in this country deserve better than a badly
written, badly produced, and craven rag.

In that illuminating LSE speech of yours, you moved the political
discourse from nationalism to internationalism, and from civil
rights to human rights. You stated categorically that the struggle
against racism and colonialism must be moved into an interna-
tional arena so that it becomes internationalized rather than
ghettoized. Listening to you I remembered a passage from Aime
Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism. Talking about the victims of
racism and colonialism, he said, "I am talking of millions of men
who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes,
trepidation, servility, despair and abasement." Your visits were
short, but your words will echo and reecho in the minds of
generations of Black folk in this country.
You had asked me toyou more about myself, but I could
tell
only give you snippets of information. It was more urgent, more
important to hear your story. You said that you wished you had
had my formal education. Well, isn't that strange, because, I envy
you your life as an outlaw, your conversion to Islam, your austere

and your single-mindedness. Your asceticism, your un-
lifestyle,
Lord of Worlds, had an

flinching belief in an omnipotent Allah, the
almost mesmeric effect on me, and how I wished that I could
embrace a religion with the same passion and certainty! But I also
have to admit to myself that a lot of these longings to be like you
are romantic and illusory. I have a third, iconoclastic, intellectual,
and Doubting Thomas eye that invariably topples gods from their
pedestals, that vivisects certainties, and that adds complexity to
what, on the surface, seems simple. Alas, I cannot be you, and you
cannot be me, and even if we could meld the two selves into one,
internal contradictions would tear the hybrid creation apart.
I sensed that by wanting to hear about my life in Guyana and my
experiences abroad, you were acknowledging a need to find out
more about the West Indian part of you. One of the things that
me after you left is this: your mother had immigrated to
occurred to
Canada during World War I, and so had my father. They might
have traveled on the same ship. Who knows?
remember his telling
I
me how the ship taking him from Georgetown to Halifax had

stopped at several islands along the way, and how they had to
dodge German submarines, particularly in that long run between
Cape Hateras and Nova Scotia. He also told me that he had been
called up to serve in the Canadian army but had, mercifully, failed
the medical examination. You see, the story of West Indian
migrations has a sameness to it.
I grew up in a village on the Guyana coast. This village with its

—
rainbow array of peoples African, Amerindian, Hindu, Muslim,
—
Portuguese, Creoles of every shade was called Agricola Rome.
My grandfather was a schoolmaster in Agricola. When he died, my
mother, who was a schoolteacher, found life in Agricola stultify-
ing, so she wrote to her brothers in the United States one was a —
lawyer and the other a Wesleyan minister — and they sponsored
our move to New York. My father had already spent years in the
U.S.and Canada and was not keen on returning, but my mother's
word was law in the family and he simply toed the line when she
brushed aside his objections. Stephanie, my eldest sister, was seven,
Jan Carew 139
I was five, and Maudie, the youngest, was two, when we migrated
to the States.
Agricola Rome would have been like the village where your
mother grew up in rural Grenada. These villages sprang up all over
the Caribbeanand the Guyanas after slavery was abolished. It was
Africans, Du Bois tells us, who in ancient times first created the
village as a viable communal and social unit. So our Creolized

African ancestors, dipping into a pool of primordial memories,
began setting up villages as soon as they had won their freedom.
Once the villages were set up, the colonial authorities stepped in
and set up their own governmental hierarchy with a village council
and a village chairman, all of whom were appointed. That official
hierarchy, of course, included a magistrate and a police sergeant.
On the other hand, the people, while paying lip service to the
officially anointed leaders, had their own secret hierarchy of
healers, priests, and teachers. The sole authority figure they
recognized above all others was the village schoolmaster or school-
mistress. They accorded to that person a reverence that bordered

on awe. They were convinced that through education they could
win for themselves a second emancipation and, this time, an
absolute freedom from ignorance, poverty, and racial contempt. It
was this tradition that shaped your mother's views when she was
growing up in La Digue.
My maternal grandfather, the village schoolmaster, was a tall,
commanding figure, and when he walked down the main street of
the village, even the most cantankerous and loudmouthed of the
rum shop denizens would lower their voices and tip their hats. He
taught me my first anticolonial lessons, and my first lessons in
racial pride. My maternal grandmother, the schoolmaster's wife,
died before I was born, but the stories I constantly heard about her
and a portrait in the living room kept her alive in my imagination.
My grandfather had a voice like the roll of drums, and I can still
hear it commanding me from age four onwards up to "Stand

straight! You're descended from African kings and queens and
Carib chieftains!" He was an early African nationalist and insisted

on having my mother hang pictures of Hausa-Fulani warriors
above my bed. Their proud ebony faces, snow-white eyeballs,

lily-white turbans, decorously caprisoned steeds, and pennanted
lances remain imprinted on my mind to this day. The Tarzan
images to which I was exposed later were never able to supplant
these memorable ones. My earliest impressions of Africa were
shaped by those pictures of Hausa-Fulani cavalrymen. I'm forever
grateful to my grandfather for ensuring that those were the images
that were etched on my mind during very impressionable years.
After my grandfather's death in 1926, my mother, father, two
sisters, and I migrated to New York. We lived in an apartment on
Morningside Avenue in Harlem, and I can still recall how every
gray-facaded building on our street looked the same, especially
at night when lights filtering through curtains glowed like tiger's
eyes.
During our second year in the United States, Maudie was
kidnapped, and I remember every detail of that drama. It was a
cool afternoon and sunlight flooded the street after a cloudy spell.
My two sisters and I were playing on the sidewalk, and my mother

would check on us every now and then from an open second-floor
window. A red car drove up and a man wearing a wide-brimmed
hat that sat on his head like a doll's house rushed out, grabbed
Maudie, bundled her into the red car, and sped away. Only after
the red car had disappeared around the corner did Stephanie and I
find our voices and call out to our mother.
After Maudie's disappearance, Stephanie and I were immedi-
ately shipped back to Georgetown, Guyana's capital. My dis-
traught parents did everything possible to find Maudie, but they

never did. A year later, though, when they were certain that they'd
never see her again, a close Guyanese friend of my mother's saw
Maudie playing on the beach in Florida, recognized her, and called
the police. There was a surprising twist to Maudie's return to the
family fold, because the woman who had paid two men to kidnap
her had actually treated her so well that she cried for days,
protesting loudly that she "wanted to go back to Mama." Young
as Maudie was, and innocent, my mother still never forgave her for
transferring her affection to a kidnapper.
Jan Carew 141
Back in Georgetown my sisters and I spent a year and a half with

Aunt Harriet, my mother's eldest sister. She had married the
Reverend Marcellus Joseph, a Wesleyan minister. His midnight
complexion contrasted with her high yellow one. "Ebony and
white pine," malicious members of the congregation would whis-
per behind their backs. But as far as Aunt Harrietwas concerned,
class and status were always more important than color, and Uncle
Marcellus, who had studied at a seminary in England, was a
respected man of the cloth.
When Uncle Marcellus was transferred to Suriname, Aunt
Harriet took us along with them to Paramaribo, where we lived in
a large Wesleyan manse. To get there, we sailed along the South

American coast in a ship that rolled and heaved and pitched until
my stomach was vacuumed of all its contents. I remember Uncle
Marcellus telling us that in Suriname we'd be closer to Africa than
we were in Guyana, and I understood what he was saying on my
first visit to the market in Paramaribo. I remember going to that
noisy, colorful market with a maid whose father was a Maroon

and whose mother was Amerindian. She bargained with Maroon
hagglers, laughed,exchanged banter, and now and then spoke in
whispers. Those Maroons, whose ancestors had been captured in
Africa and brought to Suriname as slaves, had fought and won
their freedom from slavery two centuries before. They also success-
fully transplanted their African languages and cultures in the
Americas. Theirs was a culture of resistance to tyranny and, at the
same time, one that simultaneously affirmed the genius of the
African peoples and their humanity. The Maroon communities
that those suffering from overdoses of racial chauvinism and
cultural myopia dismiss as being "backward" are still, in fact,
some of the most creative in the Americas. A collective artistic
—
expression music, song, complex rituals, dance, sculpture, con-
cepts of how the human world was first created with a diverse
array of communities living in harmony with one another and with
—
nature is as much a part of the Maroon cosmology as the breath
of life. If, as the descendants of slaves, we hold distorted images of
ourselves, then we need to take a new look at ourselves through the
eyes of these brothers and sisters who corrected those distortions

centuries ago.
That maid, once she was around her Maroon friends and
relatives, relaxed and was no longer the straight-laced young
woman who had been brought up by Moravian missionaries. As

she led me from one stall to the other, the market became a magical
was rainbowed with color, alive with voices and pulsing
place that
with It was a place where dreams and reality collided and
life.
touched the most prosaic of objects with magic. She pointed out
the vendors who were selling potent love potions extracted from
perfumed qu'ille blossoms. Exquisitely carved wooden dishes,
ladles, doors, paddles, furniture, and every intricately wrought
design was different. Then there were herbs that could cure fevers;
poultices that could soften bones and make bowed legs straight;
even herbal medicines that could resuscitate a heart that had
stopped beating. After that visit to the market, I could always spot
the Maroons in the city, not only by their distinctive African attire
but by the way in which they walked in single file as though
following a forest trail.
We had hardly spent a year and a half in Paramaribo when our

gentle, soft-spoken Uncle Marcellus died in his sleep, and once
again the unkind, tossing ship plowed its way along the coast of the
Guyanas and took us back to Georgetown. After a year of
widowhood, Aunt Harriet announced that she was about to get
married again, this time to a Moravian minister. This meant that
my parents had to return from the United States posthaste.
I grew up being constantly regaled with stories about the racial
discrimination my parents had faced in North America. I remem-

ber my mother lamenting again and again that in America,
although she was earning good money, she often found herself
"drowning in a wide indifference."
She worked as a housekeeper for a rich white family, and her
employers didn't mind her going to night classes at Columbia
University to study home economics. During the same period, my
father studied dentistry at a southern black university, and spent a
few days with us every couple of months. He often joked about the
Jan Carew 143
odd jobs he had done. He claimed that one of his most

variety of
macabre jobs had been with a mortician who sold Black corpses to
teaching hospitals.
My mother liked to tell this story about the first time she
boarded a bus south of the Mason-Dixon line. She repeated it so
often that I came to know it by heart.
"I paid my and sat down in the first vacant seat my eyes
fare
lighted on. Then uncouth human-beast of a bus driver called
this
me names and ordered me to the back of the bus. I couldn't believe

my ears! And you know something, for the first time in my life, I
felt that I wanted to kill another human being, but I thought about
my children and the good-for-nothing father I'd have to leave them

with, so I kept my anger in check and moved. But it was there and
then that I decided that pride and poverty were better than money
and bile rising up in your throat to choke you every time one of
those human-beasts decided to mash up your pride and fling insult
and injury in your face."
My mother said that the couple she worked for was so busy
living it up that they had no time for their two children. So the boy
—
and the girl the boy was four and his sister eight were left —
entirely in her hands. When my mother broke the news that her
eldest sister, who was looking after us, was about to get married
and she would therefore have to return to Guyana, the family
offered to pay our passages back to the U.S. and to underwrite all
the costs of our upbringing and education. But my mother was
congenitally unsuited to being a servant. Besides, there was a wild,
reckless streak in her, and she hated being tied down anywhere for
long. She dramatized the whole affair by declaring, "It's better to
catch hell in 'brutish ghenna' (her derisory name for her native
British Guyana) than to live as a servant in the Yankeeman's
heaven! What a place that Yankeeland is! Millions of people
around you —you don't know them from Adam, and they don't
know you —and yet they hate you because of the color of your
just
skin! Friends had told me what to expect beforehand, but I didn't
believe them until I actually set foot there."
My father eventually graduated as a dentist, and this was after
being persistently badgered by my mother to complete his studies.

When he returned to Guyana, however, he never practiced den-
tistry for a single day. This was the first time that he had dared to
rebel openly against my mother. The second rebellion that he
stagedwas when he returned from abroad for the last time,
withdrew into himself, sat on the veranda for months smoking his
ornate pipe, and willed himself to die.
He claimed that during his final months as a dental student, he
had developed a phobia about staring into the open mouths of an
endless stream of patients. In his imagination, those cavernous,
putrid-smelling mouths would grow larger and larger, threatening
to swallow him.
He chose instead to be a tailor, a sculptor, and an artist. As far as
my mother was concerned, tailoring was a lower-class profession,

and tailor shops were places where all kinds of ne'er-do-wells and
good-for-nothings congregated. And as for painting and sculpture,
these were activities that should be left to carpenters and master
builders because to separate them from more useful and responsi-

ble activities like designing, building, and decorating houses would
inevitably lead to a form of delinquency. My mother often swore
that if she'd known beforehand that my father had been appren-
ticed to a tailor as a young man, that he'd painted designs on
carriages and was a skilled woodcarver, she would never have
married him.
"He's a secretive man," she would lament, "and there are times
when even Jesus of Nazareth couldn't tell what's going on in that
closed Carib mind of his."
The final secret that he'd kept from her —that he'd held on to his
Catholic faith all of his life —was revealed only on his deathbed
when he asked her to fetch a priest. The priest came, mumbled
prayers in Latin, and lit a candle that burned by his bedside until
Mantop's breath blew it out.

When it suited her, my mother would attribute everything, good
and bad, to the different bloods that ran in my father's veins and, of
course, in my and mine. She'd say, "Secretiveness, a heavy
sister's
burden of patience, laughter as some kind of salve to cover up the

Jan Carew 145
pain that's biting inside our bellies, and stubborn hope are what we
inherited from our devil's cauldron of ancestral bloods."
When she was angry with me and I tried to make myself scarce,
she'd summon me and say, "You're standing there quiet as a
mouse and looking you fool yourself that I can't
contrite, but don't
hear you thinking. You're growing up to be just like your father,
always burying thoughts deep inside your mind! You're not
burying any thoughts with me around, Mister Man!" That was the
name she gave me when she was really angry, and, invariably, a
slap would accompany the name.
If I did well at school, this was attributed to our Jewish blood;
but she'd add a rider to her praise, saying, "Book learning and
lifemanship are two different things. Jews are supposed to be clever
and good at making money, but we had a lot of clever people in this
family and not one of them ever made any money to speak of.
Besides, those who managed to make a little money could never
hold on to So it. and break the tradition by mastering the book
try
learning and having some glue in your palms."
Stubbornness and duplicity were blamed on our English blood:
"How else do you think the English were able to grab an empire
and vampire its riches for so long?" she'd ask, raising her eyes
toward the heavens, and then she'd answer the question. "They
had to lie and cheat and steal whole countries, and they learned
how to do this in their cradles. God knows, if we could drain some
of the unwanted blood out of my veins, the English blood would be
the first to go. And as for the Scottish blood, that first Robertson
man who came to Berbice was anxious to dip his wick and light a
fire between the legs of women of every color and shade. But to
give him his due, once he settled down, he founded a school,
gathered his brood of bastards around him, and saw to it that they
all got a solid education. The English hated him, and he hated them
right back. And anyone the English hated qualified as a candidate
for his friendship."
Everything my father did turned out to be successful at first, but
financial success invariably brought on moods of grim depression
and bouts of melancholy. As a result, all of his enterprises
146 GHOSTS V\ 01 R BLOOD
owning a general store in Georgetown, working as a tailor and

abandoning this to become a gentleman farmer all simply died —
from neglect. As he grew older, woodcarving and graphic art
became his twin passions. However, he never tried to sell a single
one of his works, and if anyone offered to pay him for one of his
drawings he'd refuse the money and give it to them free of charge.
On the other hand, with money he could ill afford, he'd pay
cartmen to transport driftwood from the seashore to our backyard
and with chisel and hammer call fourth faces, fluid shapes, twisted,
writhing arms and legs and snakes coiling around naked bodies.
He never finished any of the carvings he started. As soon as a new
piece of driftwood arrived, heabandoned the one on which he was
working and gave this newly installed piece his full attention. He'd
walk around it and touch it and run his fingertips along the grain of
the wood until he found the exact spot where he would probe with
his hammer and chisel. On moonlight nights, the backyard became
a magical place with demon shapes and dark blue shadows. Once,
when I could not sleep, I looked out of the window and saw my
father standing in the midst of his magical, petrified garden. I heard
the clock strike two, but he did not move. His shadow striped the
dew-spangled grass, and he could have been a Shaman performing
a strange and secret ritual. I remember hearing my mother calling
out softly, "Come to bed, Alan, you'll catch cold standing in that
earlymorning dew!"
The gentleness in her voice surprised me. I had never heard her
speak to him with such tenderness and affection. And I thought,
"Perhaps they both live a secret life in the early hours of the
morning, one that was hidden from me and my sisters and far
removed from her daytime ritual of carping, disapproval, and

criticism of my father's every thought, word, and deed."
I realize that I've gone on a bit about my family, but family
They can take on a life of their own.
stories are like that.
The racial situation here in Britain is going from bad to worse.
The other morning when the sun was out and I was walking down
the Wimbledon High Street with a friend, a car slowed down and
two men began screaming, "Nigger, go back to your jungle!" and
Jan Carew 147
then they sped away. Do you know, on that clear bright morning,
it was as if those two human-beasts had polluted the air with their
insane hatred.
remembered your idea of having a register listing Blacks
I
everywhere in the world with professional skills, and I've been
jotting down names since you left. I hope that the OAAU is going
from strength to strength.
Warmest fraternal greetings,
Jan
NINE
His face is on the earth
his drum is silent . .
In the cold dark earth

time plants seeds of anger.
—Martin Carter, "Death of a Slave"
After talking to Wilfred on many occasions, I was most im-

pressed by his quiet strength and his dedication to serving the
community. In his seventies, he was still doing what he had done
for most of his adult life —
helping young people in Detroit to
realize their full potential. He had served for years as a Muslim
minister and had then been employed by Michigan Bell, where,
with only a high school education, he had risen steadily in the
corporate ranks. When he retired, the company and the commu-
nity had honored him. He was a "big brother" not only within his
family, but for the community as a whole.
"There are some white people at the top who will recognize
intelligence, no matter what color it is," he said, "but the disadvan-
taged whites and Blacks are being manipulated from the summit of
a pyramid and encouraged to rival one another. If the poor whites
and poor Blacks could ever unite for the same cause, they would
overcome their oppression in no time."
"How did you start working for Michigan Bell?" I asked,
149
intrigued by the switch from being a Muslim minister to joining the

ranks of corporate America.
"There was young man whom I coached for his interview,
this
and after he got the job with Michigan Bell, the personnel manager
complimented him on the way in which he conducted himself
during the interview. 'Well, to tell you the truth,' this young man
said, 'a friend named Wilfred Little coached me.' That was a time
when they were interested in employing more Blacks in the
company, so this personnel man said, 'This Wilfred Little should
be working for us. You should try and persuade him to come and
see me.' So I went to see this man, and when I took the tests I came
out at the top of the group of applicants, although all of them had
more formal education than I had. I got the job, and I would have
risen higher in the company if I hadn't started so late in life. Every
job I ever had in my life, I gave all I had into doing it."
I had learned during my wide-ranging conversations with

Wilfred that asking the odd question every now and then was the
best way of triggering a flow of random but illuminating reminis-
cences. Speaking in his calm fashion, either face to face or on the
phone, he would, over time, fill in gaps that remained after our
previous talks. Once he began him range back
talking, I would let
and forth, from his earliest recollections of his mother and of

Malcolm, to past and present happenings in his own life. The
absence of a rigidly structured time frame that placed everything in
chronological order proved just as rewarding as the talks with

Tanta Bess had been.
Once, almost as an aside, Wilfred had slipped in an important
and intriguing piece of information. He told me that Marcus
Garvey had visited their home on a few occasions.
"What did he look like?" I asked him.
"I was young, almost a child, and my memory of him isn't clear.
But he was a big man and when he spoke he had that Jamaican
accent. What I remember more clearly, though, is that my mother
told me that the aide traveling with Garvey was her cousin. That
aide accompanied him wherever he went and I'm sure that from the
way he looked, he must have had Indian blood. But I must tell you
Jan Carew 151
that when Garvey was on the run from the FBI, my mother hid him
in our house and wrote letters and dispatched for him. She had a
good education and could write clearly and well; and a couple of
times she received commendations from the leaders of the UNIA
thanking her for the good work she had done for that movement."
Then, with hardly a pause, he switched to an entirely different
topic and declared, "Malcolm demanded attention from the day he
was born. I remember that when my mother brought him home
from the hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, he used to bawl his head
off, and my mother would say, 'Wilfred, give this child the bottle, I
don't have enough milk to breastfeed him the way he wants me to,'
and with Malcolm red in the face and making himself heard, she'd
say, 'This one is going to grow up to talk to people.' She had a way
of forecasting what each of us would do from early on, and every
one of her predictions came out just like she said."
"What did she predict that you would do?" I asked.
"She said that in my quiet way, I'd always be helping those in
need. I'm a careful person, never owed a debt in my life that I didn't
repay
—
"You must have done something reckless in your youth," I said.
He laughed and confessed, "I'll tell you what the most reckless
thing I did was. When I was a boy, we had a neighbor who made
fifty-gallon barrels of cherry wine. It would start out as cherry juice
because the old folks used to say that cherry juice was good for
people suffering from rheumatism. When that juice fermented, it
became cherry wine, and they claimed that that was good for
rheumatism, too. So when people knew that it was ready they
would come, and you would think there was nothing in the world
like cherry wine. 'Oh, it's so great!' they'd say. So, I wondered, if
this stuff is so great, how come they keep saying that children
shouldn't drink it? So one day I figured out how I was going to get
some. There's a weed that grows out in the field; it grows up
straight and has some greenery on top of it. When you break it off
and it dries, the inside of it has some cottony stuff, but you hit it
against something and all that white stuff comes out, and you have
a long drinking straw. I went down into the neighbor's basement,
inserted my straw into the barrel, and sucked away. And boy, it
tasted good! I'd go sit down a while and rest,and then go back and
get some more. When I finally got ready to go back upstairs, I could
hardly make it up the stairs. When I did make it, and came out into
our kitchen, my mother looked at me and asked, 'What's wrong
with you?' She could see that something was wrong, but I managed
to stagger to my room, and every time I looked at my bed it seemed
to be moving. I got next to it where I could feel it and just fell over
and went to sleep. Next morning when I woke up, I drank some
water, and by drinking that water I was drunk again. So my mother
got me straightened out that day, but I told her she would never
have to worry about me and that stuff anymore. I've stayed away
from alcohol ever since. People used to laugh at me, but I just didn't
care."
I said to myself, "You and Malcolm were opposites, Wilfred.
You moved through life at a steady pace, always testing the ground
before you moved forward, but he was reckless, where you were
cautious. He wanted to fly like the wind."
As if reading my thoughts, Wilfred said, "I've met a lot of people
in my lifetime, but I'm telling you, Malcolm had the quickest mind
of anyone I ever met. His mind worked like lightning. Almost
before the words had left your mouth, he had grasped the idea.
That was the way he was. He could see right into what you were
saying, right to the heart of it. He found out early that in schools
they give you all this idealism and everything, but when you get out
into the real world where Black folks are always up against it, you
find out that it is a whole different way that this world is run out
there. Out in that real, white-male-dominated world, there's lying
and deceiving, cheating and murder, and one illusion piled on top
of the other. So it's not what people think and the masses are
it is,
being manipulated and don't even know it. How do you think that
you can convince thousands of young men to go and give their lives
for some patriotic reason, when all it boils down to is that they're
being sent to protect somebody's interest and to take control of
someone else's resources? Malcolm found this out earlier than
most. He knew from the inside how the svstem works. He studied
Jan Carew 153
everything from the inside. If he saw just the outside, he would

never have known it the way he did, and he couldn't have spoken
out and told the truth about it the way he did either. Malcolm
could stand at a street corner in any city and tell you every hustle
that was going on, who was doing what, which cops were on the
take, who the undercover cops were. He could read the happenings
in a city like a book. He was paroled to me when he was released
from prison. People often ask, 'Which one of the family was he
closest to?' Well, he was close to all of us in different ways. But he'd
confide in me because he knew that whatever he told me would
stop there, so he felt like he could tell me anything, even his
wrongdoings. Sometimes I would try and dissuade him, but he had
to do what he mind on doing, and he knew I was always

set his
there for him. Many times he would tell me, 'If you ever hear that
I'm in jail, come and bail me out, because if you leave me in there,
they'll find somebody to frame me for whatever they want to
charge me with. They know that they can pick me up and hold me
in jail for three days with no charge, and if they didn't charge me
during that time, they'd have to release me.' So he'd get caught in
those places where he would White people would come to
hustle.
those joints to buy marijuana and Anything they wanted, he
stuff.
knew where to get it for them. Every now and then, they'd run a
raid on those places and take him to jail, but he'd get word to me,
and I'd go and get him out right away. As far as I can remember, he
didn't really start having problems and getting involved in things
until he was around seventeen. I always felt that he'd wake up one
day and walk away from that gangster world, and prison did this
for him. He didn't just serve time, he let time serve him. When he
was paroled to me, I got him a job in the furniture store where I was
working. I remember that when he held the first paycheck in his
hand, he turned to me in amazement and said, 'I could earn this in
five minutes on the street.' But he moved forward and never looked
back. You know, every now and then, when fame had caught up
with him, he'd talk to an all-Black audience when there were no
whites in sight, and he would get right down to business. 'Now
listen,' he would say, 'there's nobody here but us, so we're going to
have a good old down-home talk.' Then he would tell them how
uncouth they were — yes, he'd use the word 'uncouth' and he —
would show them how a lot of the problems they had were things
they perpetrated against themselves and tell them that they had it in
their power to overcome their problems. That's why I tell students
all the time it's a family legacy to go into the community and try to
show young people how to rise above the conditions they find
themselves in. I still get mad when one them comes and tells me,
of
'I can't do this, and I can't do that, because I'm Black.' We've been
so brainwashed! A lot of things we accept that we can't do, we
really can do if we try."
Once, when Wilfred had said something about "the mystical
side of Islam," I Muslim?"
asked, "Are you still a
"I'm a believer in Islam" was his rejoinder, and I understood
that he was making it clear that he wanted to distance himself from
the movement that Elijah Muhammad had started and to which he
had devoted so many years of his life, so much of his energies, and
the quiet dedication that was as much a part of him as the sweat in
his pores.
"You were a Black Muslim in the early days, before Malcolm

burst on the scene, weren't you?" I asked.
"I'll tell you how I became a Muslim. There was a guy who I
helped, and he said to me, 'You must be a Muslim.' I never heard

about Muslims before, so I asked him where these Muslims were
located, and he told me. I went there and liked what they were
saying, and I joined up. But it was a small movement then. It took
Malcolm to make it a nationwide movement, to found the newspa-
per, to create the Fruit of Islam, though some of the people he
recruited turned on him like vipers. Malcolm made the movement
rich and powerful, then jealousies began creeping in. There were
little men who couldn't bear the idea of Malcolm being a national
and international figure. I used to try and warn him about what
was going on, but he wouldn't listen
—
"Malcolm was a reincarnated Othello surrounded by Iagos," I
thought, and Wilfred's voice continued.

"When he broke with Elijah Muhammad, he came to see me,
Jan Carew 155
and when he stepped had never seen him looking so

off that plane, I
devastated. It was as if someone close to him had died. I saw him

after all of his trips abroad except the last one. After that last trip,
he only told me what had happened in France."
"During our talks at the Mount Royal Hotel in London, he told
me that the forces stalking him at every turn were too big to be just
the followers of Elijah Muhammad," I said, and he agreed immedi-
ately,
"Oh, yes, there's no question of it. He became especially aware

of it when he was traveling in Africa. Nasser tried to see to it that
there was enough protection to ensure that he didn't fall victim to
some of their schemes. Malcolm knew that there was much more to
it than just Black Muslims looking for revenge. Some of the
ordinary folk who worked for American diplomats would tip him
off. Lots of times, the ordinary folk working for those diplomats,
cleaning up and doing things like that, would hear them discussing
things. So those very folk who they thought didn't know anything
would be and they'd put the word out as to what was
listening,
being discussed: that there were higher-ups in America who

wanted to see Malcolm eliminated, because they didn't want him
hauling them before the United Nations. He wasn't hiding the fact
do it, and they knew that he knew how to do it.
that he intended to
him when he and Martin were getting together
Besides, they killed
and when some world leaders were reaching out to help him.
Afterwards, they sent their people around Africa to try and sully
his name. But the name of Malcolm X still lives."
The last time I saw Malcolm X, he was in the lobby of the Mount
Royal Hotel, surrounded by reporters, leaders of the Council of
African Organizations and a bevy of camp followers. We greeted
each other fleetingly. There was a handshake, a smile, and a hasty
reminder,
"Remember to send those things to me," he said, hurrying away,
and not looking back. He was assassinated ten days later.
About the Author
Born in Guyana in 1925, Jan Carew is a novelist, poet, playwright,

journalist, and historian. Currently the director of the
critic,
Center for the Comparative Study of the Humanities at Lincoln

University, he taught at Northwestern University for fifteen years,
where he is now Emeritus Professor of African American and Third
World Studies, and previously at Princeton, Rutgers, and George
Mason universities. Carew, whose first novel, Black Midas, was a
landmark in Caribbean literature, has been an adviser to heads of
state in Africa and the Caribbean. A member of the board of the
international journal Race and Class, his essay entitled "The
Caribbean Writer and Exile" was awarded the 1979-1980 Push-
cart Prize.
Born in Guyana in 1925, Jan Carew is a novelist, poet,
playwright, journalist, critic, and historian. Currently the
director of the Center for the Comparative Study of the
Humanities at Lincoln University, he taught at North-
western University for fifteen years, where he is now

Emeritus Professor of African-American and Third World
Studies, and previously at Princeton, Rutgers, and
George Mason universities. Carew, whose first novel,
Black Midas, was a landmark in Caribbean literature,
has been an adviser to heads of state in Africa and the
Caribbean. A member of the board of the international
journal Race and Class, his essay entitled "The Carib-
bean Writer and Exile" was awarded the 1979-1980

Pushcart Prize.
LAWRENCE HILL BOOKS
Distributed by
Independent Publishers Group
Front cover pi
Cover desi
interaction with Malcolm in the crucial last
"Through reconstruction of and reflection on his
few months of his life, Carewdeepens our sense of the possible courses that Malcolm's Me
as a plaster saint or claiming his
might have taken, while avoiding straightjacketing him
symbolic carcass for any doctrinaire program."
—Adolph Reed, Jr., Northwestern University
the predica-
"Every scholar of social and religious thought, every white American who ponders
every Block American who feels the need to know
more about the
ment of Block Americans,
Molcolm X."
history of this great man will need and appreciate the scholarship Jon Corew brings to
—Nikki Giovanni, author of Racism 101
With
"Jan Carew ranks among the legendary black intellectuals of the twentieth century.
L R. James, Walter Rodney, and George Padmore,
Carew combines a sharp intellect with
C.
change. . . . Carew's observations
a passion for political justice and radical democratic
Malcolm from block nationalism to
and critical analysis shed new light on the evolution of
radical internationalism.''
literature, poetry,
"Jan's achievements are legion and cut across such diverse fields as politics,
weight of his experience and the breadth

drama, journalism, and teaching. He wears the great
most outstanding characteristic, and the one for which
of his learning easily. But of course his
dedication to the couse of freedom."
we especially honor him, is his resolute and unwavering
DennU Brutm Universitv or Colorado, Boulder
the quintessential Malcolm is recognized for what he was: a

"Thanks to Jan Corew, finally,
committed seeker of those paramount truths that

make
sensitive, thoughtful, and, ultimately,
men worthy of true martyrdom." -Vernon Jarrett, Editorial Board, (

Ghosts in Our Blood - With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and The Caribbean

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W I1ARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY

..lost thirty years after Malcolm X's assassination, his

autobiography continues to sell more than 150,000 cop-

ies a year, and a spate of books, articles, and films in

the 1990s have generated a groundswell of interest in

the man who redefined America through his analysis of

racism and his activism in the service of Black libera-

tion worldwide. But, in the process, as Jan Carew

observes in Ghosts in Our Blood, the significance of

Malcolm's legacy has often eluded us. "The real Malcolm,"

he writes, "was far more complex than the millions of

words written about him, the speeches that he made,

or the plethora of distorted images strewn in the wake

of his untimely death."

Combining the lyricism of the poet with the breadth

of the scholar, Carew, whose conversations with Mal-

toward the end of his life, captures Malcolm the intel-

lectual in pursuit of a new vision of race and a global

political movement uniting progressive Blacks and

whites. For the first time, readers will gain an intimate

knowledge of Malcolm's breakthrough to an interna-

travels throughout Africa, and his life among the Black

expatriate community in London. Central also to the

intricate discussions that transpire between Malcolm and

Carew is their common Caribbean heritage, which Carew

unfolds in the first full-fledged treatment of the history

of Malcolm's Grenadian and Garveyite mother.

Written by one of the major figures on the Pan-

African political landscape in this century, Ghosts in Our

Blood will deepen our understanding of the many forces

LAWRENCE HILL BOOKS

Caribbean /Jan Carew. 1st ed. —

©1994 by Jan Carew

Malcolm X becomes in their imaginations. As a result, they are less

Inc., made a second pilgrimage to Mecca, and declared in major

regardless of their race, color, or creed.

playing grace and impeccable good manners as I introduced him to

Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. As a descendant himself from

been almost invariably passed over in biographical writings about

Caribbean link until I was visiting Bacolet, Grenada, in 1980 and

stones?" I discovered in talking with Tanta Bess that Malcolm did

growing interest in exploring the influence of Louise Little on her

Both Earl and Louise Langdon Norton, who had met at a

Garveyite meeting in Montreal in 1918, were profoundly influ-

the early twentieth century to create a worldwide Black nationalist

death of her husband. The Louise Little portrayed by Wilfred was

I was impelled to write this book so that new dimensions of

Malcolm X's life could be brought to light. In the course of a

An obscure vision, obscure because he dared not free it

from his consciousness and examine it; he was content

was a February morning in Wimbledon when I heard the news

barely snatched four hours sleep, and my good intentions evapo-

had done, also awakened some sleeping thoughts that burned so

miserable climate?" I had often done on so many

twilight-mornings. "You're a man from a land of sun and trade

disdain for his comfortable, middle-class legacy, had sold it to me

remember that England was the "mother country." Then, too,

Ramotar, a Hindu classmate who was a midnight-black Madrasee

and when the fit was on him, I didmark

Years later, I came to regret that I didn't listen more carefully to

and I had to live without running water for weeks.

even accord a living, patriarchal personality to the hill by declar-

As I was sitting at the side of my bed with a blanket wrapped