OUR
MALCOLM
Richard Snow and Fred Allen, my editors here at American
Heritage, were kind enough to suggest that I write something this
month about my forthcoming novel, Strivers Row, which is being
published by HarperCollins, and is now in fine bookstores everywhere.
Strivers
Row is set in Harlem, during the tumultuous summer of 1943,
and it completes the “City of Fire” trilogy of historical
novels that I began with Dreamland, and continued in
Paradise Alley. My intention was to write about three
different peoples, three different religions, and three critical
moments in the development of our nation. The city in question
is New York, which has been the most contested ground in American
history—the place where we have first determined just who
gets to be an American, and what that privilege means.
Dreamland
revolved primarily around the Jewish immigrant experience at the
turn into the twentieth century; Paradise Alley, the
Irish Catholic experience, from the great immigration of the 1840s,
through the Civil War—but I could just as easily have written
about, say, the Italian, or the German, or the Chinese experiences.
What I wanted to do was to show what becoming an American meant
on a human level. Too often, the immigrant saga is depicted as
an unbroken, triumphal procession. I wanted to depict the hopes
and aspirations of ordinary people, but also their confusion and
the division of their loyalties, the struggle and the sacrifice
that surrendering their old identities for this new one inevitably
entailed.
Strivers
Row concerns the African-American experience during World
War II, and as such it presented a new set of challenges. Blacks,
of course, were not really immigrants at all, as we tend to use
the word; the first Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1626.
Unlike every white immigrant group, they did not come of their
own free will, but were dragged over as forced labor, and under
the most brutal and degrading of circumstances imaginable. If
the story of white America has been that of ever widening acceptance,
the story of black America has been one of rejection.
And
yet, African-Americans persisted in staking their claim to America,
a tenacity so remarkable that it is by itself almost enough to
make one believe in some sort of divinely sanctioned destiny for
our country. Indeed, as Albert J. Raboteau establishes in his
fascinating survey, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American
Religious History, it was an article of faith in many black
churches that it was their perseverance that would ultimately
redeem America. As the African-American theologian Theophilus
Gold Steward put it, the black church was a “hidden church
in the wilderness,” that “God has maintained for himself
as a witness” and that one day “shall shine forth
as the sun, and welcome the universal Christ.”
It was an idea that would echo all the way down
to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assertion that “The
Negro may be God’s appeal to this age—an age drifting
rapidly to its doom.” King foresaw a day when “the
historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people—a
black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the
veins of civilization. This is our challenge and our overwhelming
responsibility.”
By 1943, though, black patience had frayed close
to the breaking point. Harlem, the de facto capital of black America,
remained an incredibly dynamic place, despite the toll the Depression
years had exacted. It ran twenty-four hours a day during wartime,
and servicemen who were on leave or en route flocked there to
stomp at the Savoy, or to hear even more glorious music—perhaps
the best music that ever was—played well past midnight,
at someone’s rent party. But black residents of Harlem were
still charged twice the rents that whites were, squeezed into
grotesquely overcrowded apartments, and endowed with almost none
of the public parks, playgrounds, swimming pools and other amenities
that white neighborhoods were given. They were still regularly
harassed by the police, and excluded from most decent jobs, and
nearly all of the white city’s respectable restaurants,
hotels, nightclubs.
At the same time, thousands of Harlem’s
sons were being drafted and shipped South to basic training camps.
There, in the service of a nation that claimed to be fighting
a global war for human dignity, they were abused by racist officers,
and routinely arrested, beaten, bullied, and even killed, by local
white lawmen and citizens. Nor was this sort of persecution confined
to the South. Attempts by blacks to integrate defense plants and
shipyards, were greeted with brutal, mass assaults by white workers
in Chester, Pennsylvania; East Chicago, Indiana; Beaumont, Texas;
and three days of pitched street fighting in Newark, New Jersey,
that killed a fifteen-year-old boy—to name just a few examples.
Attempts to integrate new housing projects for defense workers
in Detroit led to a vicious, white-on-black riot that left 34
people dead.
Reports of these disturbances fell back on Harlem
like a steady drip of poison. Throughout that summer, James Baldwin
would recall seeing “the strangest combinations” of
people gathered “on stoops and on corners and in doorways”—all
of them, it seemed, “disturbed by the bitter letters they
received, by the newspaper stories they read…” He
remembered that “on each face there seemed to be the same
strange, bitter shadow.” Their rage would soon explode,
in another riot that would kill six people, and devastate their
community.
Strivers
Row tells the story of this fateful moment through two main
protagonists. One of them is the Rev. Jonah Dove, a fictional,
composite character, whose story is based in part on the experiences
of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., “the Big Cat,” longtime
minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and Harlem’s
first congressman. Jonah, who lives on Strivers Row one of the
community’s most elite streets, is the pastor of one of
Harlem’s leading churches, a position he no longer feels
worthy of fulfilling. He fears he will be unable to protect or
lead his people in the evermore violent he sees emerging everywhere,
and he is thinking of deserting his flock, and imitating his sister
by trying to “pass” in white society.
The
other main character is a young Malcolm X, still known as Malcolm
Little, who was in fact a teenaged street hustler in wartime Harlem.
To write anything about such an iconic figure is to confront some
obvious obstacles, for Malcolm X was the ultimate irreconcilable,
a bone in the throat of America. Malcolm didn’t want equal
rights, he wanted out. For most of his adult life, he
was the chief spokesman of a cult that considered all white people
to be literal devils, the degenerate creation of a mad, black
scientist. There could be no compromise with such creatures, only
separation.
It
has often been pointed out that Malcolm modified these views somewhat
near the end of his life—but only somewhat. In order to
discover just what Malcolm did believe, one must begin with his
own words, or at least, his words as recorded by Alex Haley in
the Autobiography that was published following his assassination
in 1965. Malcolm’s life story has become a totemic American
text, and deservedly so, but like all autobiographies it is less
than wholly reliable—and like most, it reveals more than
it intends. The Autobiography is both a classic conversion
story, and a bid for power, and as such Malcolm skirts certain
aspects of his life and exaggerates others—including just
how bad he really was in his hustler days. Having been down the
furthest, he could make the case that he had risen the highest.
Yet
what I found most intriguing about The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, was what was written between the lines. Again and again,
Malcolm recounts episodes of how he fooled, thwarted, or patronized
older (and presumably darker) men. Whether he is outwitting an
entire hunting party of black neighbors, or winning over a bar
full of hustlers by making a fuss over an ancient pickpocket,
or facing down a pimp and then a fearsome Harlem gangster, it
is always the younger (and probably lighter) Malcolm who triumphs.
He repeatedly expresses dismay and embarrassment over the uninhibited
passion which marked the black church services his parents took
him to, yet he claims an inherent, black superiority at dancing
and rhythm—including an almost preternatural ability for
himself.
Over and over again, Malcolm’s story reveals
the tension in which he lived, suspended between the white world,
and the black. When he was a boy, his father mocked him by his
father for the white ancestors he had through his mother’s
side—but he beat him much less than he did Malcolm’s
darker brothers and sisters, and liked to take him with him whenever
he was visiting either black or white neighbors. Malcolm’s
siblings and black neighbors teased him with nicknames such as
“Milky” and “Blondie,” “Chink”
and “freak of nature” for his skin color, at the same
time that his predominantly white classmates called him “nigger,”
and “darkie,” and “Rastus.” Those same
white classmates liked him well enough to elect him class president,
and pitied the abject poverty in which he lived enough to chip
in and buy him a brand-new coat. And yet they bodily prevented
from dancing with any of the girls at a junior high dance, and
he was told by his homeroom teacher that the most he could possibly
hope for was a life of manual labor. Malcolm insists on the second
page of his autobiography that “I learned to hate every
drop of the white rapist’s blood that is in me.” Yet
even at the end of his life—with his stories of outwitting
all those older, black men—he did not seem to notice just
how much of white racial attitudes he had yet to purge.
Forty years after his death, Malcolm has been
reduced to a single gesture of defiance; the glowering face, finger
thrust out toward the camera, over the caption of his famous vow,
“By any means necessary!” His hagiographers would
make him into the avenging specter the white mass media of his
time used to titillate its audiences, “The Hate that Hate
Produced.” Yet in watching any of the surviving footage
of the living Malcolm, it’s impossible to be genuinely frightened,
by this man who never came close to killing anyone, who probably
never committed any act of violence, as either a hood or a revolutionary.
His intelligence and humor is too manifest, the need to engage
too readily apparent, even when he is saying ugly, blustery things.
One senses an anger stems more from frustration than fanaticism,
a continuing astonishment that white people could be so driven
by the inane concept of race—and a need to goad them out
of it, even if it means throwing the same idiocy back in their
faces.
The life of Malcolm X was an essentially American
story, even though he would probably have denied it even in the
last, more questioning months of his life. It is the story of
a man suspended between identities and haunted by race, a man
forced to struggle for everything he got, and to educate himself
within a prison—and yet who ascended to undreamed of heights.
It would be facile to say that it could have happened only in
America, a country that rebuked and scorned him at nearly every
turn. Rather, it was all the Malcolms, all of those once deemed
unworthy of citizenship, black and white, who made America the
place where such things could happen. In this sense, the black
theologians surely were right, and the cornerstone of the building
has indeed become the stone that the builders rejected.
