Manchild in the Promised Land (52 page)

The Coptic speakers had been down there at the beginning of the fifties and the years just before. They were still down there, but they were being overshadowed by the Black Muslims. I never paid too much attention to them. All I knew was that these cats were building up this black superiority thing. I'd heard it before. But I hadn't heard it so vividly. At the same time, these guys were tearing down anything that was white. As a matter of fact, they seemed to resent the clouds for being white.

They were really carried away, and they were coming on strong with this thing of “Buy Black.” They were talking about boycotting all the white stores and taking over Harlem economically. I suppose it was frightening to all the white shopkeepers down there. They'd come to their doors and stand and look, as if to say, “Why don't the police do something about it? These niggers seem to be talking the same sort of thing that Hitler was doing.”

There was nothing that could be done, because they weren't causing any violence, and they weren't inciting any violence, not at that time anyway.

No one thought there would be much to this thing. I figured this was just the next phase in the Harlem Black Nationalist movement. I thought, They had the Garveyites in the twenties, then there were the Coptics in the forties and early fifties, and now this. It's just another thing that's going to die out soon.

A few cats I knew were joining. They seemed to be impressed with the badge. It was all sort of childish, the way I saw it. I remember, about 1955, I went by Seventh Avenue, and these cats were picketing a theater. I think it was at the RKO Alhambra. These cats were picketing because the theater was showing the film
Hannibal the Great,
They were picketing because Hannibal, according to the Muslims, was
a black man and they had a white actor starring in the movie. It just didn't make sense to me; I thought all these cats were crazy, and I couldn't do any more than laugh at them.

Every other week or so, I'd pass by 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. I'd see them, and I'd see the people who'd stand around listening. It was like a mass street-corner prayer meeting. They'd be talking about this Allah business and about somebody named Elijah Muhammad. The people would be looking and saying, “Yes, yes,” like some of those affirmatives they shouted out, grunted out, and nodded out at a Baptist church prayer meeting.

As I went down there, week after week, it seemed as though the crowd was getting larger. Younger guys were beginning to listen to this sort of thing. Then I started meeting people around there I hadn't seen in years.

I recall seeing Floyd Saks there. Floyd was up at Wiltwyck with me. He was a good painter; as a matter of fact, he was very talented. I figured that he could go places. When I met Floyd on 125th Street one afternoon, I didn't know he was a Muslim. He told me that he had a studio and had painted a few models, that sort of thing. He wanted to take me up to his studio and show me some of his work. I hadn't seen him in a long time, and I wanted to talk to him anyway, so I went on up to his studio. He had a piano up there, and I sat down and played. Then he showed me some of his work.

He had painted pictures of lynchings in the South, and he had painted a lot of biblical characters—a black Moses, a black Jesus Christ, and a black Abraham. Everybody was black. I asked him if he ever painted anybody who wasn't black. Floyd said that he hadn't and that he wasn't going to paint any. He wasn't interested in anybody but colored people.

He started telling me about the superiority of colored people, and I asked him if he was a member of the Coptic. He said no. He'd heard of them, but they didn't know what was going on. He asked me if I'd heard of the Muslims.

“You mean the Moslems?”

“No, man. Everybody thinks it's the Moslems, but it's the Muslims.”

“You mean those cats out there on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, don't you?”

“Yeah. They're into things, man. A new day has dawned on us. Allah has sent Muhammad to free us.”

“To free us from what, man?”

“To free us from these white devils down here, who've stolen our heritage and poisoned our minds.”

I looked at him. I said, “Are you all right, Floyd?”

“Yeah, man. It doesn't sound like the things that you've been hearing. Did you know that you were a black god?”

“Oh, man. It sounds as though they have stolen the Coptic line.”

“No, man. They know. You may not believe me, Claude, but the white man was made by a colored scientist, in a test tube, man. He isn't even real. He's like a Frankenstein monster.”

“Floyd, perhaps I'm just a little skeptical. I suppose I'm just a born skeptic, but I find that hard to believe, man. For a long time now, I've been believing that man is man, be he white or black. And that every man originates from sperm.”

He said, “It was only the original man that originated from sperm. The other man originated in a test tube.”

I said, “Man, do you know what he put in that test tube? If this is what happened, it must have been a test-tube baby, like they have modern test-tube babies. Only this one must have come out with a lighter pigmentation, for some reason or another.”

“No, man. He was made out of some chemicals and stuff.”

I said, “Floyd …”

“Yeah, you're a nonbeliever like a whole lot of these people, man. They don't even know that they're not free. You remember that I had said that Allah had sent Muhammad to free us, and you said, Tree us from what?' Here you think you're free. If you really think you're free, man, all you got to do is go to jail one time. You find out how it is. You ain't got that much going for you once you get out of jail.”

“Oh! You been to jail, man? Is that where you been all this time since you got out of Wiltwyck?”

“No, man, but I was over on the Rock for a few months. As a matter of fact, that's where I got the word.”

I said, “Oh?”

He said, “Yeah. I was walking around lost too … until I went over there and heard the message. They got a lot of brothers over there. The movement's going strong there. A lot of cats are finding out where it's at in the joint. Most of the people out here, man, if they were only to get the opportunity to go over to the Rock for a while, it might open their eyes.”

“There're a lot of people out here, Floyd, who think their eyes are open already.”

“Yeah, but they're not open to the right things. Do you think that the black man on this street is really making any progress? I mean, toward any freedom, with all these bars out here and with all the liquor stores. It seems as though that's where all the money's going. You know what happens? The white man works us to death here in Harlem, in New York, man, all over the world—all over the country anyway. He works us to death all week long and gives us a little bit of money, and we don't even keep that. You know what we do with it, Claude? We go downtown come Friday and Saturday night; we go down to the bars and the liquor stores, and we give it right back to him—for nothing. We act like we don't even want it. The black man is just a sleeping man. Unless he listens to the word of Muhammad, he's going to be lost all the time.”

“Damn, Floyd, this thing seems to have happened to a whole lot of people. Nobody's colored any more, and nobody's Negro. It seems as though everybody is a black man.”

“Well, what's wrong? Are you afraid of being a black man? We're all black men.”

“Yeah, man, you're hollering about the black man. You sound almost as bad as Adam Clayton Powell. Light-skin as you are, you're going around hollering about black man. Somebody's going to say, ‘Look, fellow, get a hold of yourself and look in a mirror.'”

“Look, I'm dark-skin. They got me on all the records, on the statistics, as a black man. If I go down to City Hall and ask for a marriage license and put down there ‘colored,' they'll make me put down ‘black,' man. They don't want to hear none of that colored thing or Negro. They got the race there, and they want ‘white' or ‘black.' So whether you like it or not, Claude, we are black men in this country, and that's all we're gon be. If you're a wise black man, you'll listen to Muhammad's message from Allah, here and now, and unite. The time has come for all black men to rise up, band together, and do something for themselves.”

“Yeah, well, Floyd, what would you suggest? Right now?”

“Man, the first thing we got to do is stop buying anything but the necessities from the white man. Anything that you can get from a black man, go on and buy it. Man, you know what's wrong with the people out here? They don't realize who they are. They don't realize
what they are. We're not Negro, and we're not colored. These are words that somebody else gave us, that the white devils gave us … to help rob us of our own identity. We're black men, and we've even been taught to be ashamed of it, when, actually, we should all be proud of it.

“You don't know … I bet you don't know anything about yourself. You think your name is Brown, huh? That's not your name. That's just the name that some old white man gave to your forefathers when they brought them to this country, stole their heritage, and blinded them to their identity.”

He told me that my name was probably Abdul or something-or-other, a Muslim name.

“We all got those other names, man. We got to stop being Negroes. The only way we gon stop acting as Negroes is that we stop seeing ourselves as Negroes. The first step toward not seeing ourselves as Negroes is to reject those names they've given us and the term ‘Negro' … those Anglo-Saxon names that they give to us and call us Negroes by them. Then they treat us like Negroes. Man, I'm deathly afraid of being a Negro in this country, because the Negroes get messed over, messed over right and left.”

Then Floyd started talking about how the white man had robbed the black man in Africa of his heritage and put him into slavery by feeding him all this white religion. He said, “The black man's got no business with Christianity. They've even got us looking up at some white Jesus. Jesus was black. It says so in the Bible. It says that Solomon was black; it says that Moses was black. But here they've told us a lie. They took the Bible and rewrote it for themselves, telling us that they were white so we'd be looking up to them for being white. If you look up to Jesus and Jesus was white, you got to look up to these white men because they're white. Right?”

“I think there's a little more to it than that, Floyd.”

“Yeah, there's a lot more to it. This whole religion is foreign to a black man. A black man's got no business kneeling down and praying to some old crazy figurines and talking that old ‘Our Father, ‘Jesus,' and that kind of business. This Christianity thing is the worst thing that ever happened to Negroes. If it wasn't for Christianity, Negroes would have stopped praying a long time ago. They would've started raising a whole lot of hell. They would've known. There would've been thousands of Nat Turners and Denmark Veseys. But
most of the Negroes were too damn busy looking up in the sky and praying to some blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus and some white God who nobody was suppose to ever see or know anything about. You look at it around here. The Negro's got a whole lot of religion, the so-called Negro, the black man. He's got more religion than anything else.

“But he's still poor; he's still being abused. So why the hell don't the white man take some of that religion he's been preaching to us all the time and give us some of the money? Why don't he take some of that religion and use it himself, to make himself less mean and stop killing all those people, lynching all those people down there in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama? If there was anything to this white man's religion, he wouldn't be so damn wicked. How can he be so righteous, how can the religion that he's living by be so righteous, if it's going to let him come in here and take a whole country from the Indians, kill off most of them, and put the remainder of them on reservations ?

“Look around you. What's it taught Negroes to do? All this Christianity? Nothing, nothing that could benefit them. All it's taught Negroes to do is bow their heads to Mr. Charlie, buy bleach creams, straighten their hair, buy a Cadillac car that they can't afford, and follow some white Jesus to a mythical place called heaven. Ain't this a damn shame?”

He said, “Look, I want you to come on over here with me to the bookstore, Michaux's bookstore. They're speaking out there. Some brother is speaking out there tonight.”

“Look, Floyd, I've heard these cats before, man. All they're saying is things that I've heard before, and I haven't been sold on it yet.”

“Yeah, that's because you're still lost as to your identity and just where you're going and what's to be obtained in life. If you're ever going to really get anything in life, man, you've got to get out … separate yourself from that white man. Give him back his bullshit ideals, and give back the values that he's given you to bullshit you by and to keep you stupid. First of all, Claude, you got to let go that white god, because that white god's going to fuck over you just like it's been fucking over every black man in this country ever since we got here.

“The hip people, those who saw it, they're going on, and they're exploiting black people too. The colored preachers who go around preaching about that white god, they're the ones who dig it, man.
They saw it right from the beginning, right after slavery. When a cat started preaching, shit, this meant that he didn't have to work any more. He got the calling. It was an easy life. They're not kneeling down and praying to that god; they're holding out their hands. They're preaching and talking about saving, patting sisters on the ass and saying sweet things to them, and going into their pocketbooks. They got the sisters working and bringing them all that fucking money. That's the same thing that Mr. Chuck's been doing all these years, Claude.