Fanon (23 page)

Whatever happened to Fanon's plan. Did any of it really happen. Is an ancient Malian trading route still patching itself together through the jungle, fossilized on stones, written on water. At night, if you peer up between black towers of twisting, snaky foliage, will you find the road's bright shadow mirrored in the sky, a road of light carved through dark treetops, a path mirroring the long scar on the ground, the old wound scuffed into the earth by camels, men, horses, and mules a thousand years ago, the wound Fanon would rip open to heal Algeria, heal Africa, heal himself.

In a way the world situation ain't all that complicated, my brother declares to me. Then he says words to this effect: What it is is the right hand don't know what the left hand's doing. Simple as that. You
know. Cause it's all about one person, really. Hey, I don't know shit about biology and shit but it's like we all in one body, we all the same person who lives spread out over the whole world, everywhere, you know, one giant body with people the cells of it, different cells but all part of the same big old body. Ain't about no two lonely people like Adam and Eve in a garden fucking and making babies and babies making babies till you got all these different people ain't never seen one another, spoke to one another. Huh-uh. We's all one person, all the same body. Fuck color and countries and religion and male and female and she-male, that's all bullshit. You got this one human person trying to make a life for itself on the planet. Seems like a lotta us, but we's all the same one, doing the same thing—hunting for something to eat every day, a safe place to lie down at night. Wanting good loving and good talk. Some singing and dancing and maybe getting a little high now and then. We stay alive by having babies, growing new cells cause the old cells get tired and wore out. You and me and everybody else all rolled up together into one big One. But the trouble is the hands of the body done forgot each other. Everybody into they own mind, they own thing, they own little world and that's cool, maybe that's how it's always spozed to be. Plenty room for that as long as the big old body's hands keep track of one another. As long as they don't forget they working for the same person. I mean, the way it is today the hands don't speak no more. Squabbling. Fighting. Grabbing. Hands hate each other in a way, you could say. Trying to strangle the one neck they own. People so stuck up in they own little worlds they forget they live in the same body and got to depend on the same two hands.

Like when he was in Peabody High, my brother reminds me, and they killed King, my brother says, and me and the fellas tore up Homewood Avenue and started a strike in school. Mr. Glick the principal, same principal as when you were there, right, bro, anyway, ole Slick Glick all shook up and called us strike leaders down to his
office on the first floor. What do you want, he asked. Straight up. No hello, how you doing bullshit.
What do you want.
Just like that and I thought to myself, you little, bald, four-eyed motherfucker, what the fuck you think we want. We want what you want. We want what you got. Want your money, your watch, your nice house up on Hiland Avenue, your car, some pussy from your cute little four-eyed daughter. Want a good job like your son gonna get. I wanted everything I thought Mr. Glick had, and maybe even before all that stuff, I wanted him the fuck out of my fucking face asking questions. That's the shit I think I really wanted. I wanted to be asking the questions. I wanted my goddamn cops outside the door so I could call them in to haul Glick's ass to the slam if he didn't give me the right answers. Thinking all that kind of bullshit or something like it it seems to me now sitting here thinking back on it. Course I didn't say nothing. Just glared at Slick Glick cause I didn't know what to say or how to say it. But what I should have said, even if it didn't do no damn good, which it probably wouldn't have, is this—We the same person, fool. Get your foot off your own neck. Stop choking me with my own hands. Don't you know you're dissing yourself when you disrespect me. Ain't you figured out that you hurting your ownself when you hurt me. Go ahead. Toss my ass out of school and pretty soon ain't gon be no Peabody High. You out a job, sucker. If I ain't got nothing, one of your hands is empty. The empty hand won't be there when you need it. And when that hand goes to stealing and shooting to get what it needs, who you think it be sticking up. Whose kids gonna be out there in the street running crazy wit me or from me. Who's gonna be sorry when raggedy Pittsburgh ain't fit for nobody.

That's what the world situation's about. What the terrorism shit's about. One hand trying to outhurt the other. Stone confusion. People scared of they own damned selves. Cutting off heads, cutting off hands like we got heads and hands to spare. We done forgot we the same person. Killing off our own body, part by part and soon ain't
nothing gon be left. We scared cause we doing the bad shit to our ownselves. Scared and can't stop.

A cruel world, bro. Every mother's child knows it's true. Mom's right but she's wrong too. Trouble does last always. Sure it does. A person can't hardly get along even with all the body parts in good shape. Every day on TV you see these pitiful crazies. Serial killers, folks who snap and kill up everybody they can shoot before the cops kill them. It's like people locked up in dark little rooms with a penknife and so fucked up scared and lonely they start whittling little pieces off they own body. Tiny bits so it don't hurt too much at first. You know. They keep slicing away at theyselves and afterwhile don't feel nothing. Maybe even start liking it. Damn. One hand cutting off the other and they think they solving they problems.

The younger Fanon was tardy. Very late indeed. Only a quarter-hour remaining of the afternoon session when he sidled into the rear of the classroom through the back door and slumped onto his seat. He'd been missing since recess. Earlier I'd asked my nephew Joby the whereabouts of his brother and received no satisfactory reply. I assumed a sudden illness had indisposed the younger Fanon. Or rather, that had been my most charitable supposition. Neither Joby nor Frantz a bad boy, and among my sister's children, Frantz plainly had something especially salvageable about him, though I'd detected good minds and abundant natural talent in all my Fort-de-France nephews and nieces. However, Fort-de-France bad habits and pernicious influences cannot be eradicated by a few weeks here in Le François attending my school and boarding in my home. Absolutely no backsliding can be tolerated, so the fellow would be punished for his offense. Illness no excuse, if illness it was that caused him to absent himself from school without seeking either my permission or instructions as to where and how he should spend the vacated afternoon.

Ordinarily the disciplining of my young charge would have begun the moment he attempted to slink into the classroom, assuming his place as if it's his prerogative to come and go as he pleases, as if his presence or absence were purely his affair and would not be noticed by every single pupil sitting at his desk, nor the professor at the lectern intent on the business of instruction. I would have pounced upon this disrespectful disruption of the usual routine and stung the young man immediately, employing the occasion to impart a general lesson to my struggling scholars, yet something about the manner in which my nephew slid, no, crumpled onto the bench of his desk warned me against greeting his very late arrival with too harsh, too peremptory a reprimand. A beaten look about him. The look of one who had been severely disciplined already. I was reminded of some of our country people, poor cane cutters, domestic workers, landless peasants, their shoulders bowed eternally, resigned to whatever punishment their betters impose. That guilty-before-charged submissiveness of slavery days retained in the bodies and minds of far too many of my island brethren. Pained, ashamed by what I saw, I decided, for the moment, to let an exasperated nod, a withering glance suffice as response to my nephew's trespass. In vain I waited for him to raise his eyes and dare meet my gaze. I was denied a full view of his features until I'd resumed my lecture and then I observed him snapping—
snapping
the only appropriate word—snapping to attention, stiffening his back, squaring his shoulders, drawing himself up as tall as he could be while seated at his desk, the posture I taught my students their first day in my classroom and insisted upon every day thereafter. Clearly this organizing of himself came at a considerable cost. Directed finally, as they should be, toward the front of the room and the lectern behind which I stood, his eyes were utterly devoid of expression. I was unnerved by the blankness of his stare and could not repress a shudder. The boy's eyes looked through me, through the wall behind me, his empty gaze shaking the school building,
toppling it, demolishing the town, sending the entire island to hell, beginning with this small corner of it I believed I'd consecrated to learning and progress.

Empty eyes. Shattering eyes. No disrespect, no challenge in them. Nothing. Nothingness I cannot expand upon because finally that's all the eyes held. Nothing. An island superstition says that mirrors must be veiled during periods of fresh mourning to spare the living a glimpse of the newly dead's fear. One lifts the veil at one's peril, and perhaps unwittingly I'd committed just that trespass, blundered into the abyss of my nephew's uncovered eyes.

I learned later that he had sneaked away at recess to spy upon the autopsy of a drowned man being performed in the basement of Le François's municipal building. Secreting himself in a narrow passageway at the rear of the town hall, he'd crouched at a tiny ground-level vent and, hidden from the view of passersby, witnessed as many stages of the gruesome operation as he could bear, the horror accumulating until he became ill watching the slicing and draining, watching the scalpel digging deeper and deeper, the prying and sawing, dead flesh peeled, split, butchered till it was nothing but gore, nothing more, nothing, not man or woman, not horse or cat, nothing. The nothing I saw in his empty eyes when, like one of the shades Ulysses observed haunting the shore of the River Styx, he materialized in my classroom.

In November of 1961, the year he composed
The Wretched of the Earth,
which could have been titled
Notes from Underground
or
Invisible Man
or
Black Boy
or
Things Fall Apart,
flogging himself to write fast because he's aware death is closing in and might overtake him before he finishes his book, the same year whose last months he spends in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland, guest of the government of the United States, Fanon learns his book has been published.
The urgency, compression, conviction, and force preserved in certain sections of
The Wretched of the Earth
remind me of Martin Luther King's "Been to the mountaintop" speech, which was delivered as Fanon delivered his book, just before dying. My point here is that when death is imminent, whether a person stands at a podium in the Mason Temple in Memphis or lies terminally ill in bed or waits at the bottom of a trench to be shot, any place will do as actual location or metaphor to snap truth into focus with resounding clarity. Being there, bearing witness as the end approaches grants unimpeachable authority, a final truth, truth lost as it's found and perhaps that's why such witnessing convinces when it is eloquently reported—convinces and also overwhelms. Another's life shaped into words—Fanon's book, King's speech—how much of it can anyone else really use. Its truths belong to the witness. Darkness abides. The witness's words are evidence of a known world closing down, its light, however bright or small, piercing or shallow, swallowed by the unknown. Fanon's words, King's words reveal a glimmer of truth earned by them, experienced by them, their lives large, their witness compelling because they struggled to know, though the unknown shrinks not one iota.

The first thing a baby be thinking, my brother says, when its little self lands here and it's laying all cozy and warm, snuggled up on its mama's titty, what it thinks is, Hmmm, hmmm, this ain't such a bad place here, I love this place, the baby's thinking and the next thing the lil rascal thinks, my brother says is, Lemme see if I can eat it.

One day Thomas thinks if he hadn't been born black maybe a good second choice would be French, then realizes what a stupid thought he's entertaining. Plenty of French people are blacker than he is, or so it seems anyway, so his choice of French not a choice of an
alternate color, and since toying with the idea of changing who he is by erasing his color and trying on another color was the intent of his thought experiment in the first place, he's getting everything assbackwards, because French not a color and he's not a color. His thought no thought at all, just daydreaming, just remembering he loved Curtis Mayfield singing "If you had a choice of color, which one would you choose my brothers" but could never decide what the words meant.

We some mean animals, man, my brother said. Mean. Just plain mean. Don't know about women—my woman tells me women just as mean in their different way—but guys, I know guys is just plain mean. A guy needs somebody he can fuck wit. Look around here. Inmates punking inmates. And the guards got us to fuck wit. A few good guards but plenty go out their way to be evil and mean. Hard to believe sometimes. Like the way they teased Goines the day he was screaming and begging to go to clinic. Everybody knew Goines got AIDS. Everybody knew measles going around and Goines shoulda been taken out the population. Huh-uh. Measles got in his sores and they just let him rot in his cell. Laughed at him flopping around. Shit. All us got good days and bad days but how come guards make it their business to aggravate inmates. Answer is they mean. Answer is they miserable unless they hurting somebody. Ain't that the reason generals let soldiers tear up a town after they capture it. The reason some nothing dude with a nothing job and a nowhere life brings home the shit people dump on him all day and beats on his wife and kids. Little king. Lil motherfuckering tyrant at home so he can go on back to his job next day feeling like he's somebody. Way the whole world works, my brother. Here in the joint. Everywhere. Cause men deep down in they hearts and souls is mean. Mean. Like that evil, grinning president we got, man. Got the whole world under his thumb but his cowboy ass ain't satisfied unless he's fucking with somebody.