Strivers Row (63 page)

It was Elijah who brought the faithful out each morning. Forming them up in the street—rows and rows of the Fruit of Islam, all the men in the temple, including his brothers and his father. Each one of them dressed alike in dark suits and maroon fezzes, and standing at perfect attention. All of the women, including his wife, and his sisters and mother, dressed in their white headscarves and long, white dresses that flowed down over their shoes.

Elijah had never been prouder than when he saw them marching, straightbacked and solemn, to the courthouse every day. Lining up in perfect rows out in the street, all around the courthouse, trooping in to fill up all the seats in the courtroom. Unnerving the white cops and judges by their very presence there. It was, at last, an army of their own, just like the one Marcus Garvey had envisioned. One willing to follow him as well as anyone, even the Master himself.

My people,
he had thought for the first time, watching them.
Look at
my
people!

They had stayed with him throughout the trial. Robert Karriem's testimony had unnerved them a little, Elijah knew, with all his craziness. Refusing even to remove his fez in court—putting it back on again and again, every time the bailiff took it off, until Karriem and the bailiff stood up there by the witness stand doing a Charlie Chaplin routine that made every white person in the courtroom shake with laughter.

“It was crucifixion time, and I killed this man with the crucifix. I said,
‘Ali-kerslump,'
and he fell dead!” Karriem had shouted from the stand, then sprung to his feet again.

“Well, I got to go now,” he said matter-of-factly, and started to walk off the witness stand. Looking genuinely surprised when the bailiffs had grabbed him, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Let me go! I'm the king here, and everywhere!” His wife and children sobbing and wailing, and trying to cling to him, the officers dragging him out of the courtroom.

Behind him, the room was hushed. The faithful were looking down at their shoes, embarrassed in front of the white man, Elijah could tell. He had done his best to buck them up. Reminding them back at the Allah Temple that Master Fard had yet to testify, that when he did he would surely set everything right, and present the true side of their faith to the world—and they had believed him. Some of them even breaking into spontaneous chants of
“Fard is Allah! Fard is Allah!”
—and then,
“Elijah the Prophet! Elijah the Prophet!”

They had barely been able to sit still when Master Fard finally took the witness stand the next day, Elijah included. He was gratified to see that the Master looked nothing like the pitiful, helpless creature he had seen strapped into his straitjacket in the psychopathic ward, just a few weeks before. Instead, he walked into the courtroom in his best blue suit, and silk tie, as calm and confident and immaculate as ever. Elijah had leaned forward on his bench seat, along with all of his brothers and sisters from the temple, so eager were they to hear what they had been waiting a lifetime for— to hear someone put the white man in his place.

“Is it true that you are the author of the book in question, the—” the assistant district attorney began, pausing for a moment to read from his legal pad.

“
Secret Rituals of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam?
”

Elijah had held his breath then, and shut his eyes. Nearly unable to bear the anticipation of what the Master would say—waiting for the same exquisite flow of words to usher forth from his mouth, just as it had that first night in his living room. But when he heard nothing, he opened his eyes again, only to see Master Fard smiling that small, secret smile of his, and shaking his head slightly. The fez no longer crowning his head, either, Elijah noticed for the first time—only his waves of straight, oiled, white man's hair.

“No, no. That is simply a holy book in our religion. Some of the brethren”— and here Fard made a small, condescending gesture with his hand—“some of the brothers and sisters think too much of me.”

“Doesn't this book in fact condone just the sort of ritualistic human sacrifice the defendant is accused of making?” the white lawyer demanded—and the first small tendrils of fear began to snake their way through Elijah's mind. Thinking he must have somehow misunderstood the rules of the trial, wondering why it was that the
government's
lawyer was questioning Master Fard first—

“Oh, no. There are many things in this book—just as there are in the Koran, just as there are in the Bible—which the uninitiated do not begin to understand.”

“But did you in any way, through word or deed, or promise, authorize or sanction the murder of Mr. Smith or others?”

“Oh, no, certainly not!”

“Didn't you promise any true believers that they would be rewarded with a button with a picture of Muhammad on it, and a free trip to Mecca, if they brought you the head of four white devils?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Fard said on the stand. He looked genuinely shocked, the words puttering out of his mouth like a motor running down. Then he smiled again.

“Didn't you tell colored schoolchildren that the American flag means nothing to them, and that they would get a material award for the murder of white people?”

“They have misunderstood my teachings,” Fard went on, his voice sounding a little embarrassed, now—drawing the sympathy of even the bailiffs and the attorneys and the court reporter, Elijah could see. Everyone in the courtroom leaning unconsciously toward him.

“The tenets of Islam certainly do not call for murder,” he told them sadly.

“It is true that your followers think that you are God, is it not, and obey you as such?”

“Well, our new converts are very enthusiastic,” Fard replied, in a knowing tone that made Elijah's breath stop. “Sometimes their enthusiasm exceeds the bounds of their knowledge, when it comes to certain theological concepts. They mean well. They simply take some things too far.”

Elijah could see the bailiff and the judge both beginning to smile. The thoughts running through their minds so obvious to him that they might as well have shouted them aloud.
You know those Negroes. Those fools, and dupes. Always getting carried away.

He thought that he should do something—try to rescue Master Fard, cause a disruption in the courtroom, anything—for surely the Master was being coerced into speaking and acting like this. Surely they had drugged him, or altered his mind in the mental hospital, or were holding something over him. But all Elijah could do was sit where he was, paralyzed, listening to the assistant district attorney go on and on.

“Would you characterize your organization, the Allah Temple of Islam, as a
racket
? Designed to get all the money you could for yourself, through the selling of clothes and even names to your followers?”

“Well, I guess you could call it that,” Fard said, still smiling slightly.

“And if this court were, in its wisdom, to see fit to let you go free, would you continue to run said
racket
in Paradise Valley?”

“I now understand the danger of my teachings,” Fard told the white attorney gravely, “and I promise that if I am spared incarceration, I will use my influence to disband the Allah Temple of Islam, and leave the city of Detroit and vicinity as soon as possible.”

He was dismissed then, and Elijah watched as he made his way down from the witness stand and out of the courtroom, accompanied by two of the jail guards. Smiling again, a little man walking slightly hunched over, as he made his way past the benches filled with black men and women who believed him to be God—not so much as turning his head to look at them. All of them sitting in stunned incomprehension as they watched him go. The silence broken at last by a single loud guffaw—a scornful white man's laugh that made all their heads whip about resentfully. Only Elijah hadn't bothered to turn, knowing already who it must be. Knowing that, no matter how white the laugh sounded, it came from a Chinaman.

Once he was released, Fard had told the remaining faithful at the Allah Temple that it had all been a trick to fool the white man. He had them put out that nobody could really tell what was said in that courtroom—that he had released a silent, invisible mist to cloud men's minds, so that in the confusion Robert Karriem could be whisked off to the Island of Nippon, instead of the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where the government said that it had sent him. He said that he had done it all for them, his people, and hadn't it worked? After all, he had walked out of the white man's courtroom free, and wasn't that a miracle no one in the Black Bottom had expected when the trial began?

The Master had even changed all their names again, and made them stop wearing the red fezzes that distinguished them from the unbelievers on the streets of Detroit. He had even changed the name of the Allah Temple of Islam, to the Nation of Islam, and named a whole new guard of the Fruit of Islam, headed by Elijah, to take charge of it. But by then the white newspapers were all running wild headlines about voodoo cults, and human sacrifices. The names of all known Muslims were stricken from the welfare rolls, and their children were taunted, and beaten up in school. Before long, they no longer had enough people to hold services in the Hancock Avenue temple, and were reduced to a storefront on Hastings Street, along with all of the other, small-fry churches.

Worst of all, Master Fard had been ordered to leave the city and never return, under threat of having to do hard time. He had left on a warm, late spring day, after a final Sunday afternoon service. Elijah, of course, had been chosen to drive him down to Chicago, in a black Ford Model A—the conspicuous, red Chevy coupe gone now. It had been a day of tears and remonstrations from the few, remaining faithful— Elijah making sure that they had all turned out to bring the Master gifts, and place garlands of flowers on his Model A, while Master Fard stood on the running board and addressed them one last time.

“Don't worry! Don't worry, I am with you!” he had cried, raising his arms toward the heavens. “I am with you, I will be back to you in the near future to lead you out of this hell!”

He had climbed on into the backseat then, with the crowd still calling out his name, and when he looked in on him, Elijah saw to his surprise that the Master was crying. The tears filling his eyes and flowing down his cheeks as he turned away from the window, and his weeping people.

“I love the black people. Tell them I love them, Ghulam, my faithful one,” he pleaded with Elijah. “Tell them I will destroy the Nations of the Earth to save them, and then die myself !”

At that moment the whole scene shifted, as it would in a dream— as Malcolm knew it would in a dream. Yet he still could not shake it off, and wake himself. Instead, there was only Elijah standing before
him
now, pointing his finger at him as he repeated the Master's words.

“Remember—don't trust anyone. No matter what he tells you. And don't trust the white man.”

“But I do trust her,” Malcolm heard himself saying. “
Do
you, son?”

“But I love her!”

“
Do
you? I don't even think you know
what
you are anymore. I don't even think you know if you a man or a woman!” Elijah told him—then reached out with his long index finger and jabbed him hard in the chest.

“
Do
you?”

He felt a sharp, stabbing pain at the spot where Elijah had touched him, a pain much worse than anything a finger could cause—and when he looked down, he saw that an arrow had sprouted there, just like the ones in the figure of St. Sebastian, in the movie. He reached a hand up, to try to pull it out—and brought his fingers back covered in a white gelatinous liquid. Even as he watched, more of it continued to flow freely from his nipples— obviously and indisputably
milk
.

“Jesus
God
!”

He screamed and jumped up out of the bed, running into Miranda's bathroom. Ripping open the bathroom cabinet, where he tore through all her neatly stacked medicaments and beauty aids, searching for something, anything, that might help him. Half-reading the names on the labels of the boxes and bottles as they tumbled into the sink below—endless cold creams and hair dyes, little jars of Hydrox, and Nix Liquid Bleach, and Dr. Fred Palmer's Skin Whitener. Thinking distractedly that all those ads in the
Amsterdam Star-News
must be on the level about improving complexion if even a white woman like her bought them. Unable to find anything, though, that would stop the milk from pouring out of his breasts, coagulating now on the bathroom floor.

Desperately, he tried to stick two Band-Aids over his nipples, though they were quickly made limp and useless by the continuing flow. He struck at his chest, squeezing his breasts, trying anything that might shut them off or empty them out. None of it working— the milk finally just petering out as he sat shaking on top of the toilet seat, breathing in long, dry sobs. Remembering how his mother had looked when his half-brother, Buster—the son of the barber salesman—had been born.

The milk bubbling up, darkening the inside of her shirt at any moment. She who had always been so careful about her appearance. Not bothering to change it even after days, when her whole blouse had become soured and stiffened with milk—

Malcolm jumped up again, not wanting to spend another minute in the apartment. He ran back into the bedroom, where the little green book was still where he had fallen asleep on the bed. He scooped it up, then threw his clothes on—glad at least he had been naked when it all started. Grabbing the sheets up off the bed and hurling them into the bathroom hamper, cleaning his mess as best he could but then bolting back down the stairs, and out the basement door. Running his hand constantly along his chest even as he ran—afraid that he might start lactating again at any minute, right out in public.