Escape (44 page)

Since parking on the street across from the docks before dawn Saturday morning, Suleiman Abdalla had kept his eye on the Star
of Vladivostok
as instructed. He was to report anything that seemed amiss, but other than the guard smoking and pacing beneath the weak yellow light at the bottom of the gangplank, there'd hardly been any activity at all.

To keep himself from dozing, he listened to a taped English-language version of Sayyid Qutb's book
Social Justice in Islam.
And when that threatened to put him to sleep, he turned on a flashlight to read a newspaper that he'd found lying on a bus-stop bench. The newspaper had a story about a "crazed cabbie" who had run over a woman outside of the building where Jessica Campbell was on trial.

Small world,
he thought. He'd met Campbell years ago as a student at NYCU before getting kicked out for bad grades. Now there she was on trial for murder, claiming that God had told her to kill her children. Ironically, he, too, would soon kill for God.

In a few days, the world would forget all about Jessica Campbell and instead be talking about Suleiman Abdalla and the other members of the Al-Aqsa Brigade. Instead of a courtroom artist's watercolor depiction of his former professor sitting at the defense table drawing on a sketch pad, he himself would be immortalized on the front pages. His photograph would appear for years to come in newspapers and magazines, and used in the background for television specials about terrorism in the United States. There'd be hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories written about the "Ramadan Martyrs," he liked to fantasize; and every year on the anniversary of their deaths, the stories would be regurgitated, along with pious commentary about what had been learned ... or not.

Family members and friends, not that he'd had many, would talk about him—how he'd been a "normal kid" and an "excellent student" and how none of them had "seen this coming." They'd blame "his affliction" for his actions.

They don't understand what it means to give yourself up to the will of Allah ... to hear His voice and understand His plans for you,
Abdalla thought as he turned the pages to follow the story of the woman struck by the taxi, who, according to the story, was going to sue even the newsstand vendor because she had been stupid enough to run out into the street.

"This country deserves whatever Allah, to whom all thanks are due, and The Sheik have in mind," he muttered. "Americans are the ones with the affliction."

Suleiman Abdalla was a short, wiry, twenty-five-year-old African American with
vitiligo.
As a doctor had explained to his horrified parents when he was a kid, vitiligo is a skin disorder in which the body attacks its own melanocytes, the skin cells that produce melanin, the substance that determines the amount of pigmentation in the skin.

Christened as Justin Rhodes Jr. at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Columbus Avenue, he'd grown up with all the advantages. His father, Justin Rhodes Sr., was an internationally known oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and his mother, the former Beatrice Little, had once been Miss Black New York City. With those kinds of genes and financing, he should have had it made.

Early life meant English nannies, piano lessons from a semi-famous Russian composer, a French tutor for French lessons, and a Japanese monk for Buddism and karate instruction. There'd been summer camp in the Poconos and, beginning in third grade, attendance at a small private school in New Jersey. Most weekends he had come home to his parents' four-bedroom suite in the Helmsley Carlton House on Madison to be spoiled rotten, and at the end of every visit he was shipped back across the Hudson with the admonition to "study hard so that you can be a doctor like daddy."

In the sixth grade, while showering after gym class, one of his older classmates saw the patch of white skin that had started to spread across his genitals. "What'd you do, rub it off?" the boy had shouted, pointing with derision.

Having recently discovered masturbation, and concerned that there might be some truth to his tormentor's comment, Justin was reluctant to tell any adult. He avoided the shower for the rest of the semester—until, during one visit home, his mother took note of the white spaces on his hands and a spot on his nose. He'd been taken to see the best skin specialists in New York. But there was nothing they could do except inform the Rhodes family that the condition was not dangerous. Their boy would simply lose the pigmentation in his skin until it either stopped on its own accord or he was as white as Casper the Ghost.

During the summers, he would return to Manhattan to live with his parents, though within two weeks he always sensed that he was overstaying his welcome. So to get out of the apartment during the summer between his junior and senior years, he'd responded to an ad in the newspaper for a part-time "baker's apprentice."

When he arrived at the Il Buon Pane bakery on Third Avenue, he hesitated, afraid that the owner would look at his skin and be repulsed. But the little old man who owned the place saw him looking in the window and waved him in.

"Hello, my friend," Moishe Sobelman had greeted him, as he would every weekday morning until Justin had to go back to school. The baker had made him sit down and try his cherry cheese coffee-cake, "the best in the world," and only then had they talked about the job.

The job requirements were to show up for work on time, do what he was asked, and treat the customers like they were his friends. "Can you do that, Mr. Rhodes?"

"Yes, Mr. Sobelman, but aren't you worried that your customers won't like how I look?"

The old Jew sat there for a moment and then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, exposing a faded purple number. "You see this," he said. "A long time ago, evil men put this here; I did not let it dictate the type of person I would become. God made you as you are, which means you were made perfect; do not let what others think or do dictate the type of person you will become."

Justin smiled. "When can I start?"

It was the best summer of his life. He worked hard and learned how to be a baker from Mr. Sobelman, as well as how to treat other people. The old man's wife, Goldie, had always greeted him with a hug, and several times on Friday afternoons he'd stayed for a dinner of boiled chicken after the shop shut down for Shabbat. Then he could hardly wait for it to open again on Monday, often showing up before Mr. Sobelman had even come downstairs.

Then summer ended and it was time to go back to school. "I don't want to go," he told the old man on his last day of work. "I want to stay and work for you. I want to be a baker."

The old man patted him on the back but shook his head. "School is important," he said. "You need to finish so that you keep your options open. There will always be a place for you here if you decide that working for an old baker is what you want to do with your life. Perhaps we'll see you next summer, eh?"

Justin never went back. During his senior year, the vitiligo spread quickly across his face until he looked like a mime. Except for a few faint freckles on his cheeks and nose, his soft brown eyes, and his dark hair, he had no color left. Nor did he have friends. The few blacks at the school shunned him, as if he might be contagious, and the whites avoided him as "a freak." Even weekends at home were uncomfortable; it was obvious that his parents were embarrassed by his appearance and happy when he returned to school.

Trying to regain some measure of blackness, Justin started "slumming" after school and on weekends, riding the bus to Harlem where he hung out on the streets. He had a lot of spending cash, so after shaking him down the first couple of times, a local gang decided it was more lucrative to let him buy his way into their company. But no matter how much he paid or complained, he was the brunt of their jokes and given derogatory nicknames such as "Whitey" and "Snowball."

After high school, he left the gang and walked into the neighborhood office of the Nation of Islam, located at the corner of 112th and St. Nicholas Avenue on the north end of Central Park. The man sitting at the reception desk with his feet propped up was watching a video of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan railing about the Jews. The man handed him some literature and said he was welcome to stay and watch. "This goes back a few years when Minister Farrakhan was speaking at the Maryam Mosque in Chicago," the man explained.

More out of politeness than because he wanted to watch some guy in a bow tie yelling into a microphone, Justin sat down.

"German Jews financed Hitler right here in America," shouted Farrakhan. "International bankers financed Hitler, and poor Jews died while big Jews were at the root of what you call the Holocaust. Little Jews died while big Jews made money. Little Jews were being turned into soap while big Jews washed themselves with it. Jews were playing violin, Jews were playing music, while other Jews were marching into the gas chambers."

"That's Allah's truth right there," the man told Justin, who nodded but wasn't sure what to make of it.

He thought about Moishe Sobelman, obviously a little Jew who'd blamed the Nazis for the Holocaust.
Perhaps he didn't realize that it was the big Jews who were responsible for Sobibor.

Justin joined the Nation of Islam. If his welcome wasn't warm and he occasionally had to field the question "what the hell happened to your skin, brother?" at least no one called him names. He learned a lot from the local leaders, a whole different truth from what he'd been taught in schools.

Late at night in his bedroom at his parent's apartment, he'd devoured the
Autobiography of Malcolm X
and various tracts written by Farrakhan, from which he learned to hate Jews, Israel, homosexuals, and all white people. Even outwardly nice Jews, like the Sobelmans, were only disguising their true natures and using him to further their own financial gains. Nor were whites to be looked up to; they were, Farrakhan pointed out, only "potential human beings ... who have not evolved yet." And, of course, Christianity was the religion of his oppressors; Islam was the true religion for the African man.

The more he learned, the more he argued with his parents about what he was learning from the Nation of Islam. When he came home for the weekends, they seemed to spend a lot of the time elsewhere; if they hosted a dinner party, he was welcome only "so long as you leave that Nation of Islam crap at the door." The fall after he graduated, his parents were only too happy to rent a small apartment for him in the East Village so that he could attend New York City University. He became a sociology major in the African American Studies program.

One of his professors was Jessica Campbell, who wasn't all bad for a white bitch. She was the one who'd told him and the other blacks in the auditorium attending a round-table discussion of her essay "A Feminist View of the Criminality of White Males in American Politics" to "rise up against the man." But when he learned that she was a Jew, he'd dropped her class. Pretty soon he stopped going to all of his classes, and when he failed every course, he was expelled.

As a member of the Nation of Islam he felt he finally had a place where he belonged. Then one day he'd arrived early for an appointment, hoping to learn that he'd been awarded a paid internship to work with underprivileged kids in Harlem at an NOI-sponsored summer camp. No one was at the reception desk, so he'd wandered back until he heard voices coming from the director's office.

"So who gets the internship?" asked a voice he recognized as belonging to the director.

"Well, Justin probably deserves it," said another voice, which belonged to the youth minister. "He's been here the longest and done the most volunteer work. The other candidate, Kasheena Johnson, is only here to meet boys, and she's damn lazy."

"Yeah, but her daddy is a doorman at the Apollo and can get us free tickets," the director noted. The two men laughed. "Besides, that half-albino mother fucker gives me the creeps; it's like some sort of white fungus is eating away his blackness."

Again the men had laughed as Justin felt the blood rush to his "albino" face and tears sprang to his eyes. "A fungus among us," chortled the youth minister.

Justin rushed from the office not caring if the men heard him slam the door behind him; he was never going back. He told himself he was relieved to be away from the Nation of Islam. The way he saw it, they weren't really Muslims. Few of the leaders he'd met had ever read the Qur'an; most of what they knew they'd heard from others, and a lot of that seemed to have been made up as they went along. If he was going to dedicate his life to Allah, he'd find a real mosque.

A
fungus among us,
Abdalla repeated softy, aware that a soft light was beginning to grow in the east. He could even make out some details of the ship and the docks.

Like his friend Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, he had been both horrified and excited by the events of September 11, 2001. It was staggering to imagine so much death and destruction from a couple of airplanes. But it was good that people of color had hit back at the whites and Jews who ran the country, and he was proud that fellow Muslims had taken the initiative.

He was standing only a few feet away from Khalifa that day on the street corner listening to Imam Jabbar, and he, too, had been invited back to the mosque for prayers. He knew that night he'd found a home. This was the real Islam. At the Al-Aqsa Mosque, men prayed five times a day and studied the Qur'an. Sometimes a visiting imam from the Middle East, in New York to raise money for Islamic charities, would read the Word of Allah, which made it even more real.

A year or so after he joined, he found himself among the select few invited to special classes with the imam to hear stories about jihad and the martyrs who were fighting the Enemies of Islam to expel them from the Middle East. Like the martyrs of 9/11, they had been willing to die to bring about a world governed by the laws of Islam and now enjoyed the fruits of Paradise. Even some of the enemy recognized the rightness of their cause, the imam had said, posting the article "What Goes Around, Comes Around" by Jessica Campbell on the mosque bulletin board.