The Writer and the World (28 page)

The absence of responsible West Indian support ought to have told against Malik. But he turned it to his advantage; American Black Power had provided him with a complete system. If educated West Indians wanted nothing to do with Malik, it was only because the black bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, “a tiny minority within a minority,” had cut themselves off from “the man in the ghetto.” In Malik’s system, the Negro who had not dropped out, who was educated, had a skill or a profession, was not quite a Negro; there was no need for anyone to come to terms with him. The real Negro was more elemental. He lived in a place called “the ghetto,” which was awful but had its enviable gaieties; and in the ghetto the Negro lived close to crime. He was a ponce or a drug peddler;
he begged and stole; he was that attractive Negro; and now this Negro was very angry. The real Negro, as it turned out, was someone like Malik; and only Malik could be his spokesman.

Malik’s revolutionary Negro was in many ways the familiar crap-shooting spook. But it was a construct for a provincial market, and Malik’s instinct about the kind of Negro the British newspapers wanted or would tolerate was sound. In the
Guardian
for August 9, 1971, Jill Tweedie made the limits of British tolerance plain.

Tweedie did two Negroes for her page that day. One was Annie P. Barden, a “school counsellor” at an all-black elementary school in Washington, D.C. Tweedie gave her a rough time. Annie Barden wanted to talk about her work; Tweedie wanted to hear about race and drugs and black militancy. They showed films about drugs, Annie Barden said; they “talked through” things like slavery and the position of blacks in the South; she hadn’t sensed any militancy in her pupils (some of whom were four, and none older than thirteen). But what about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King? How had Annie Barden herself become aware of race prejudice? Had things really changed? How many Americans regarded the black as a human being? The majority? Half? Were there
any
jobs for her pupils? The professions mightn’t be closed to blacks, but wasn’t it more difficult for them? At the suggestion, now amounting to insistence, that she was a Negro and her teaching job therefore a waste of time, Annie Barden offered her interviewer tea. “She is evidently embarrassed,” Tweedie noted, “by the whole question.”

For her other Negro, a man, Tweedie had a lot more time, and space. He was an American Black Muslim and he was in England to “promote” his autobiography. It wasn’t clear what he did for a living. He had started a Malcolm X Montessori school in California, but he didn’t teach at the school because he hated white people—“No SS man could invest the word ‘Jew’ with any more contempt,” Tweedie noted—and he didn’t want his hate to rub off on two-year-olds. “If you’re going to kill, it must mean something. You should kill people because they are evil, not because they are white … They call me a nigger but I’ve invented my own kind of nigger. My nigger is me, excruciatingly handsome, tantalizingly brown, fiercely articulate.” Tweedie was taken: “This black man is a handsome man, a brigand with a gold ring in his ear … tall and spare and stoned on agro, sometimes overt, sometimes spread over with honeyed words about as sweet to receive as a punch in the kidneys.
With a woman the agro comes masked, translated into sexual terms …”

“Personally,” Tweedie concluded, “I find Miss Barden’s passivity far more depressing than Hakim Jamal’s anger, and far less hopeful for the future.” Hakim Jamal—that was the name of the brigand with the gold earring. The autobiography he had come to England to sell was a conformist and very late addition to the Negro autobiographies of the 1960s: poverty and self-hate, drugs, Islam, reform, celebrities, sex, hate. His claim that he was God had won him an “odd spot” appearance on the
World at One
radio programme. But he apparently hadn’t told Tweedie that he was God. And if he didn’t teach at his Malcolm X school it was because it had lasted one year, with one teacher, had closed down fifteen months before, and existed now only in the brochures he carried around with him. As for Annie Barden, she no doubt went back to her elementary school in Washington, counseling a thousand pupils.

Malik’s instinct, in the late 1960s (the Tweedie article appeared in 1971), about the kind of Negro that was wanted was sound. But the role was a consuming one. The black rebel, even if he wanted to, couldn’t do a job; he couldn’t appear to be declining into “passivity”; anything like repose could extinguish his reputation. No one expected him to act out his threats, but the poor black was required ceaselessly to perform.

In July 1967 Malik—filling in for the more internationally known Stokely Carmichael—went to Reading and spoke to a mixed group of about seventy. “If ever you see a white man laying a hand on your black woman, kill him immediately.” It was quite harmless, just the usual cabaret. But Malik was charged under the Race Relations Act. At his trial he told the recorder to sit down and “cool it”; he had the Koran wiped with warm water before he swore on it; and he was allowed to perform Islamic “ablutions” before giving evidence. He was sent to jail for a year. All the newspaper reports of his trial were cut out and filed for him. But the carnival was abruptly over.

I
N
A
PRIL
1965, at the start of his great fame, he had written to his mother: “I am not afraid anymore.” All the torment of his early life had been submerged in his role as the racial entertainer. Now his bluff had been called. His Black Power was no power in England, his newspaper
fame offered no security. His ghosted autobiography,
From Michael de Freitas to Michael X
, came out while he was in jail and was poorly reviewed. The publicity declined. His release eight months later, though noted by television, was scarcely an event. A carnival element persisted: outside the prison gates there was a welcoming Negro who, refining on the X business, had given himself the name of Freddie Y. But Malik had changed.

He planned a second volume of autobiography. The title he first thought of was
My Years with RAAS
—the old Malik, the old joke. But as his mind darkened he changed that to
Requiem for an Illusion.
What was the illusion? England? His idea of his place in England? His career as the X?

From a long (at least fifty pages) and primitive novel he later began to write about himself, it is clear that he had begun to secrete a resentment, soon settling into hatred, not of white people or English people, but of the English middle class he had got to know: the people with money or connections who patronized him in both senses of the word, who were secure, who could fix anything, who held Negroes in contempt but were fascinated by him. In his novel, which is a childlike grafting of fantasy to fact (he is himself, with his own name), he has this middle-class English fascination turn to awe, perhaps even to love, and then, unexpectedly, to physical alarm. The setting isn’t London, but Guyana. Malik has made himself a hero in that country, a great orator, and there are people in the streets who shout for him to be king.

It is hard, with Malik, to speak of a plan; he was a man who moved from event to event. But it seems that when he came out of jail his thoughts turned to real power. In 1968 he joined the Black Eagles, a Negro fantasy outfit intended as a Notting Hill version of the Black Panthers. Malcolm X, Michael X; Black Panthers, Black Eagles. The “prime minister” of the Eagles was a former Trinidad steelbandsman who had given himself the name of Darcus Awonsu. Malik became his “minister without portfolio” and got a trip to Canada in a chartered aeroplane, to attend a Black Writers Conference in Montreal. Minister, writer; and now he found he had a reputation with Chicago and Toronto blacks as the only man in England to have gone to jail under the Race Relations Act. “Travelling first found out I was Hero”: this is from the notes for
Requiem for an Illusion
, and it also says something about his attitude to his earlier career as the ponce X. “Hero Image greater overseas.” He had
somehow made it: he began to think that he was “the Best Known Black man in [the] … world.”

There was further proof the next year. Nigel Samuel, the son of a property millionaire, offered money for a “Black House” project in Islington. A number of shops and offices, acquired on a twenty-one-year lease, were to be converted into a black “urban village.” It was a coup: the demonstration of the creative, “Panther”-like side of the black revolutionary. But Malik had no talents. To believe in the Black House was to believe in magic; it was to share Malik’s half-belief (the con man’s semi-lunacy, which makes him so convincing) that words and publicity made real the thing publicized. Within a year the Black House was failing; and like Hakim Jamal’s Malcolm X school, like RAAS, like the Black Eagles, like the ventures of so many Negroes who act not out of a sense of vocation but trap themselves into performing, as Negroes, for an alien audience, the Black House existed only in its brochures and letterheads.

“Emergence of American Prototype like Panthers—with home base wanting carbon copy whereas the nation encourage self.” This is from the notes for
Requiem.
It reads like an attempt to rationalize the failure of the Black House, to suggest that it was part of his plan. But Malik was trying many things that year; he had begun to look beyond England. He had travelled with Nigel Samuel to Timbuktu in a chartered aeroplane, and later they had gone to Guinea to see Stokely Carmichael. He had sent a not very literate emissary to the OAU in Addis Ababa. And he and Steve Yeates and, fleetingly, Nigel Samuel had gone to Trinidad. Kingship called for a black country. Everything was now pointing to an eventual return to Trinidad.

T
RINIDAD
in 1969 was moving towards a revolution. The black government of Eric Williams had been in power since 1956; and something like the racial enthusiasm that had taken him to power now seemed about to sweep him away. Political life in the newly independent island was stagnant; intellectuals felt shut out by the new men of the new politics; and American Black Power, drifting down to Trinidad, was giving a new twist to popular discontents. Black Power in the United States was the protest of an ill-equipped minority. In Trinidad, with its 55 per cent black population, with the Asian and other minorities already excluded from government, Black Power became something else, added something very
old to rational protest: a mystical sense of race, a millenarian expectation of imminent redemption.

A revolution without a programme, without a head: it was something Malik might have exploited. But he didn’t make much of a political start. He “marched” with some striking bus drivers, but he puzzled them when he spoke, not of their cause, but of one of his obsessions: the need to change the uniform of the Trinidad police.

There was also talk of a “commune.” Randolph Rawlins, a left-wing Trinidad journalist and academic, a man wearied by the simplicities and cynicism of West Indian racial politics, went one Sunday to the beach house, the site of the planned commune, where Malik was staying. Malik played tapes of Stokely Carmichael’s speeches. Steve Yeates was there, and a “retinue” of young men. “They were totally subservient,” Rawlins says, “and would react immediately. Malik’s daughter was sick. He said to one of the men: ‘Go and get a doctor.’ The chap said he didn’t know where to find a doctor. Malik said:
‘Go
and get the doctor.’ I got tired of sitting down and seeing this man look ominous and talking rubbish. I adjourned to the sea.”

Already, though, a “retinue” in Trinidad; and when Malik and his family followed Nigel Samuel back to England, Steve Yeates stayed behind. After thirteen years in England, Yeates had come home for good. Letters from Malik—busy in London with the Black House, busy with Nigel Samuel in Africa—were infrequent that year, 1969. In October Malik sent regards to “all of the Brothers” and promised a second visit by Samuel; in November he announced his imminent return, with a party of thirteen. Nothing happened, but Steve Yeates waited. One day his father, who ran a little bar in Belmont, asked him about his relationship with Malik, and he said: “It’s a long story, pappy.” A long story: Steve Yeates, black, fine-featured, with “soft hair, soft curly hair you felt you wanted to touch,” but now with the English scar on his back, and now with the Black Muslim name of Muhammed Akbar, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, Lieutenant Colonel in Malik’s Black Liberation Army.

A black woman who had known him in the old days, when “he was the love of all the little girls in Belmont,” fell in with him again.

With the Carnival that year in Trinidad there came the Black Power revolution that had been maturing. There were daily anti-government marches in Port of Spain; revolutionary pamphlets appeared everywhere, even in schools; sections of the regiment declared for the marchers. Even the Asian countryside began to be infected. A spontaneous, anarchic outburst: a humane society divided in its wish for order and its various visions of redemption. But the police held firm; there was no need for Venezuelans or Americans to land. The outburst died down.