Eureka Man: A Novel (23 page)

And she did the next morning at breakfast.
For three nights in February, she said, students had been
peacefully protesting the failure of the town's only bowling alley
to racially integrate. On the fourth night the students had lit a
bonfire to stay warm, then the police came and extinguished it. Her
friends started another one, and when the officers attempted to put
out this second fire, some of the students threw rocks and bottles
at them. What followed was a barrage of gunfire with students
running in every direction. In the end three young black men were
dead and twenty-seven other students lay wounded.

“Most of them had been shot in the back,” she
said.

Theodore was enraged. “Why didn't the
brothers have guns?”

Joanne shook her head calmly. “We don't
believe in violence, Cousin Theodore. At least the majority of us
don't.”

“Violence! You got to protect yourself, don't
you? You can't let those honkies get away with that kind of
stuff!”

“Cousin Theodore, that's exactly the kind of
thinking some of those young men over on campus have right now, and
it's only going to lead to more violence.”

“As Christians, Theodore, we don't believe in
violence,” said Aunt Beulah.

“What about an eye for an eye? Isn't that
what the Bible says?” Theodore couldn't believe what he was
hearing.

“It does, son, but we are dignified people
and must abide by the law.”

“I'm leaving now, Momma,” said Joanna. “We're
having a meeting with the Dean of Students this afternoon.”

Aunt Beulah hugged her Bible and trembled.
“Child, don't you be on that campus past dark. You make sure you're
back in this house. I'm not fooling now.”

“I'll be home, Momma. I promise.”

The day was so hot that the cotton planters
had come out of the fields early to find shade. The boys tried to
beat the heat off with the breeze they caught while riding their
bicycles as fast as they could down the back roads. When they met
up with two of Leon's friends, one of them said the best place to
be on such a hot ass day was in a swimming hole. “How bout old man
Tucker's pond?” said Leon.

“Too many of them water moccasins,” said one
of the boys. “Let's go to the creek.”

Theodore, who was deathly afraid of snakes,
watched the boys ride off without looking back. When they were out
of sight, he pedaled back to Aunt Beulah's house, propped Joanne's
bike beside a shed and then did the strangest thing. He bolted as
fast as he could through a cotton field without a clue into which
direction he was running. When he got to the end of the first
field, he ran straight into the next. At the end of this second
field, he encountered a patch of woods and ran right through it. He
tried to stay close to the road that led into Orangeburg, but he
wasn't sure. With each twig his Pro Keds trampled and snapped, he
ran a little faster.

When he finally came out of the woods, he saw
a garage up ahead on the edge of town. A black boy about Theodore's
age was changing a tire on a rusted out pickup truck. The boy was
barefoot and wore grease-stained overalls. The sweat on his ebony
skin glistened in the sunlight. Theodore asked him where the
University was located.

“Straight down yondah on Main Street, pass
them there traffic lights. All them buildings is the University,
heah?” The boy looked at Theodore curiously. There was no mistaking
him for a local boy, for most of them wore their hair thick and
nappy, and Theodore's haircut was close to the scalp, in a high
fade. That, and his jeans were pressed, tighter fitting, and double
cuffed.

“Good looking out, my brother,” said
Theodore, and then he pressed on as if he was on his way to fight a
rival gang.

Beyond the traffic light he saw a large sign
on the corner-Campus of South Carolina State University. Beyond the
sign lay a maze of sidewalks and buildings. Young black men and
women were walking in every direction. Theodore crossed the street
and walked down the sidewalk until he reached the heavy shade of a
magnolia tree. He could smell lemons and charred wood in the breeze
and he could hear a conga drum faintly beating a steady rhythm. He
looked around and saw groups of students sprawled out under the
shade of the tree, some reading, some eating sandwiches, others
napping and listening to music. There wasn't a white person among
them and he was flabbergasted. For a while he stood there under the
heavy branch of the magnolia tree where the air was cool and sweet.
Fifty yards in front of him he noticed several students with books
and backpacks leaving the main walkway and disappearing behind the
administration building. Curious, he headed in that direction.

When he turned the corner of the building a
large group of students was gathered in a semicircle listening to
one of their own who was shouting into a megaphone. The brother
wore a blue and orange dashiki and a matching Yoruba hat.

“…are African Americans citizens with rights
just like anybody else, brothers and sisters! We are not animals to
be slaughtered! Those racist pigs murdered three of our innocent
young brothers only a few hundred feet from where we now stand!
Right over that hill!” The speaker pointed in a northwesterly
direction. “Henry Smith! Murdered! Samuel Hammond! Murdered! Delano
Middleton! Murdered! And twenty-seven others were shot in the back!
Why? I'll tell you why! Because they were exercising their right to
gather in a peaceful manner! Because they were protesting the
illegal segregation of a local bowling alley! They weren't carrying
guns! Or knives! Or pipes! They were carrying schoolbooks! They
weren't bothering anybody! It's time now! It's time to wake up,
brothers and sisters! We've been sleeping for four hundred years!
The white man will continue to annihilate our people until we wake
up and take matters into our own hands! I say!... I say to hell
with the president of this University. I say we demonstrate
tonight! Now what do you say?”

“Power to the people!”

“Black power!”

“We want justice!”

“We want it now!”

Theodore joined in the shouting. “We want
justice now!” He punched his fist into the air. Someone had placed
a stack of books on the grass and he picked one up, waving it above
his head. “We want justice!” He weaved through the crowd until he
approached the front. That's when he saw his cousin Joanne shaking
her head in frustration. As she turned in his direction, she saw
him and shouted his name. “Theodore! How did you get here?”

“I ran,” he said. “All the way.”

“Let's go! You can't be here. And where did
you get Invisible Man from?”

“What?”

“That book. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
Where did it come from, Theodore?”

“I found it in the grass.”

“You can't just take it. That book belongs to
one of these students. You have to put it back.”

She followed him through the crowd to the
place where he had been standing when he picked up the book. He
tossed it on the ground. “Why can't we stay?” he asked.

“We just can't.”

“Why not? These are my people too.”

That was true, she told him on the way home.
But the campus was no place for a fourteen year old boy who didn't
know the first thing about white people from the South, even if he
did know how to take care of himself, she added for his benefit. He
asked her if she was going to attend the demonstration that night.
She told him that holding another protest against the orders of the
University president was just asking for more trouble and, no, she
wasn't going to attend.

“I wish I could go. That brother was right,
you know. We have to start fighting back.”

WITNESSING THE WRATH of those who had experienced the
Orangeburg massacre lit a revolutionary flame in Theodore's heart
and made him hate the white man even more than he already did.
Three years after he returned from his trip to the South, he traded
in his birth name for one that better suited his anger. Theodore
Elijah Burnett became Brother Aziz X. Mohammed when he joined the
Nation of Islam's Masjid Number Twelve located at Park and
Susquehanna. It was the black pride and militant aspect of the
organization more than the religious doctrine that appealed to
him.

At home his sister Shirley was first amused
by her brother's newfound commitment to pressing his own clothes,
polishing his shoes, and laying out his bow ties neatly on top of
his scarred dresser. But when she gradually noticed the
once-playful side of his personality was nowhere to be found, she
began to take him more seriously. For hours at a time he practiced
standing at attention in the middle of the living room, frozen like
a statue, unblinking, a piece of handsome granite. Once a cockroach
crawled all the way up his body and across his face and he never
flinched. After that, Shirley gave him plenty of room whenever she
passed his way. His mother, a devout Christian, was disappointed in
his new religion, but pleased with his newly acquired
discipline.

Brother Aziz X. Mohammed was not just another
new convert at the Masjid Number Twelve either. He was also the
newest and youngest member of a squad that meted out discipline to
the brothers who didn't have enough of it. It was a position at
which he excelled and took more seriously than anything he had ever
done. On his nineteenth birthday, he walked through the front gate
of the Philadelphia House of Corrections, a full-fledged lieutenant
in the Nation, and his fellow Muslims in tow addressed him as
Brother Minister. Once again he was charged with murder, but this
time it was no gang war murder. This time he was accused of killing
a corner storeowner, motive unknown. The cause of
death-strangulation. The dead man was found fully disemboweled,
hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling in the back room of his
store.

Inside the House of Corrections, Theodore's
problems were compounded when he received word from the streets
that there was a rat inside among the rank and file. One morning,
the rat was spotted entering the security office after having just
told his brothers he was on his way to the visiting room. Two days
later the rat was found hanging in his cell with his guts dangling
out in front of him and a finely honed shiv buried in his rectum.
The story in the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that the rat had
been an FBI informant waiting to testify against a group of Muslims
from Masjid Number Twelve, who had allegedly driven a van to the
Nation's Capital and massacred a room full of people. Brother
Minister Aziz X. Mohammed and two of his lieutenants were charged
with the jailhouse murder.

Like the government and the rest of the
establishment, the criminal justice system was, as far as Brother
Minister Aziz was concerned, run by the same “white devils” who had
massacred his Brothers in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Consequently,
the last thing he wanted was a white man representing him in court.
When he asked for black representation, the judge denied his
request so he, in turn, refused to participate in his own defense.
Whether it was the white attorney or the abundance of evidence they
had against him, Brother Minister Aziz was convicted on both counts
of murder. The judge gave him life for the street homicide and ten
to twenty years for the jailhouse murder.

By the time he arrived at Riverview
Penitentiary, Champ was a seasoned leader of men who were born to
follow. He loved his fellow Muslims, but he loved even more the
brothers he had grown up with on Oxford Street. Blue Light. Omar
Ali. Gus. Disco Bob. Big Jake. Shotgun. Cheese. Percy. Soul Train.
And even crazy ass Fat Daddy. These were his homeboys and they were
all there, doing time together.

What some people considered his only vice,
Champ considered reparations: The Native-American and the arsonist
who lived in the cells on either side of him had both been
feminized long before Champ laid on their backs. On alternating
days these pretty boys pulled Champ's curtain shut and struck a
salacious pose, angling the hips just so, poking out their narrow
behinds. He grudge-fucked them and took care of their material
needs. The ambience they created gave Champ's life a new semblance
of domesticity.

THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-TWO
prisoners poured
into the dining hall to attend an emergency meeting of the
Pennsylvania Lifers Association. Those who called themselves the
walking dead-baby, cop and serial killers, murderers by arson and
the one who strangled a nun with her own rosary beads-were the
first to arrive. Though the walking dead didn't have a hope or
prayer of ever receiving a pardon due to their heinous crimes, they
nevertheless participated in life. They filed grievances, pressed
license plates, fed the birds, watched movies, jerked off, demanded
sheets without blood stains, completed Bible correspondence courses
and showed up at every function of the only organization left in
the world they could rightly call their own. To show his
appreciation for their solidarity, Champ had given these men the
title of official custodians of the association shortly after
becoming their new president. No matter what the occasion was, the
walking dead showed up ahead of time to clean the restroom, mop the
floors, wipe the tables and set up the refreshments.

The hall was noisier than a train station
before Champ called the meeting to order. Some men were calling out
numbers. A Christian at one table shouted 6-6-6 to a Christian two
tables over. A bookie hollered the daily number 3-6-9 up and down
the aisle. A drug dealer called out his prices, three for ten,
seven for twenty. And one man who had been crossed by another told
him he had his number.

The rookie guard thought he was sitting on a
powder keg the way those black, white and red faces smiled and
frowned at one another while they drank mugs of black coffee and
ate sugar cookies by the handful. When he saw two stamping and
pawing at the ground, he called for backup.