The Writer and the World (29 page)

Steve Yeates took no part in these events. And Malik was later to say unkind things about the revolution. “I cannot understand people who are hell-bent on all kinds of political nonsense,” the Trinidad
Express
reported him as saying. “They want power or the trappings of power, but that entails hard work.”

This was now his line, and perhaps also his delusion: that his time in England had been a time of work, that he had become the best-known black man in the world through work, and that there were lots of bogus Negroes about who wanted to reap without sowing. It was his way of rebutting those who had begun to criticize his handling of Black House money. And it was also his way of saying that though he had missed the revolution in Trinidad, he was its true leader. Negroes existed now
only that Malik might lead them: life hadn’t caught up with art, but play had ceased to be play: through jest and fraud, disappointment and self-deception, Malik had reached the position that every racist power-seeker occupies. And it can be no coincidence that in March 1970, immediately after the Trinidad revolution, he started on his largest fund-raising exercise, to make the big killing before his return to Trinidad.

H
E ANNOUNCED
a Black House Building Programme Appeal. The Bishop of London was asked for his “learned advice” about the “spiritual needs” of “the many thousands who will be participating in the Black House.” A more direct appeal was made to Charles Clore: “… a fantastic world-famous reality … unique project … let us show the world that Britain is not prepared to be a drop-out in the great race of culture and progress …”

At the same time Malik consulted Patricia East of Patrick East Associates (International Public Relations), who did the PR for Sammy Davis, Jr., in England; and East offered to handle the account “personally.” The Black House, she said, should be registered at once as a charity. She thought they should aim at setting up a string of Black Houses throughout the country. And she outlined a campaign which would, among other things, “promote the name of Michael X as a household word for the good of the community at large.” There was a further point. For her services East required £3,500 (exclusive of expenses) for the first year, payable quarterly and in advance. This wasn’t perhaps what was expected; and East, as she now says, “lost touch” with Malik.

He went to work on his own. A standard begging letter on the theme of “Peace and Love” was devised: “… The difference in culture should not prevent men from living in peace. The men of culture are true apostles of equality.” A more businesslike letter went to Canada Life Assurance; they said no. Charter Consolidated said no, twice. A reminder was sent to Charles Clore, who hadn’t replied; and now Clore’s secretary said no.

It must have occurred to Malik at this stage that there was something wrong with his “image.” Canon Collins was invited by “Brother Francis (Director, Planning and Development)” to pay another visit to the Black House, “this time at least for lunch.” And Malik drafted letters—“Dear Brother”—to the presidents of the university unions of Cambridge,
Oxford, Reading, Swansea, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and asked to be invited to speak on Black Power or the Alternative Society. He claimed to have spoken at most of those universities “about three years ago”; he referred jocularly to his jail sentence; he used words like “confab” and “relate with”; in his letter to Edinburgh he said he was mentioning the names of Alex Trocchi, Ronnie Laing and Jim Haynes “as friends because it is possible that the only one you know me by could be Michael X.”

At the same time, as a Muslim, “a worker and producer,” a builder of a mosque, a converter of the infidel and a trainer of the young (“we are able to train in excess of 500 directly and an unresearched multiple indirectly”), he was making an assault on the treasury of the Emir of Kuwait. He wrote to the Kuwait Student Union and asked to be invited to Kuwait: “As an articulator for our people I am invited to speak by all of our major universities in England.” He sent an autographed copy of his ghosted autobiography to the Kuwait embassy and, no doubt for reasons of drama, asked for it to be packaged in the presence of an embassy official and sent by diplomatic carrier to the Emir, together with a letter. He wrote two letters to the Kuwait ambassador. One asked for an “audience even if it is only for five minutes,” and drew attention to the second letter, which had been put in an envelope marked “X.” X marked the spot: “As you know, the biggest property owners in this country are Jews. Our landlords are Jews. We must get them off our backs … We ask you to deal with this our request of direct financial aid as an urgent and top priority matter. In terms of money the figure of £100,000 (one hundred thousand pounds) is a very realistic and immediate need … Yours in Islam, Michael Abdul Malik.”

It was as another kind of Muslim, Harlem and very devout, that he wrote to his Black Muslim contacts in the United States. He reported success (“an urban village … a beautiful place to live in”); he confessed his fears about the Jews. But he reversed the Kuwaiti approach. The hard request came first; the flannel followed. “We need most desperately, a large injection of capital … Sometimes I feel very much abandoned and alone when I preach the word of the Messanger
[sic].
Sometimes, when our need is very great and there seems no way to turn a Brother who has never spoken to the Holy Aposle
[sic]
would say to me ‘Why don’t you bare your heart to him, surely he will help.’ But somewhere in my head and maybe this is because I had the honour to sit with him and look in his
eyes, I feel that it is my duty to go out and search for our needs in the wilderness of Babylon.”

Later, in a statement at his trial, Malik summed up this period. “I returned to the United Kingdom and started winding up my business, liquidizing certain of the assets that my family had acquired for the many years we spent in Europe.”

He encouraged some of the people around him to believe that he was successfully “liquidizing”: money or the show of money would win him those “recruits” he was looking for. But he went too far. Like a man touched by the fantasies of his own begging letters, he began to speak of fantastic sums; and he trapped himself. He said he had got £250,000 from Nigel Samuel for the Black House; and there were people who believed him. (In the
Sunday Times
of March 12, 1972, the “Insight” reporters gave an outside figure of £15,000.) But the Black House had little to show for £250,000; in February 1970 a cheque for £237 to the London Electricity Board had bounced; and it began to occur to some people, during this fund-raising year, that Malik might be preparing to get away to Trinidad with the equivalent of a million Trinidad dollars.

“… Within found out that threats become Real—like being shot at—Problems with Black and Whites on organization.” The notes for
Requiem for an Illusion
are cryptic. But, as in the autobiography, Malik distorts one story by fragmenting it into many scattered stories; and the notes themselves later provide the key. “Relation with outside—myth of immense wealth—How did this come about.” Malik was beginning to feel that in London he was close to danger. And even later, in Trinidad, he was never to lose the fear—perhaps some threat had been made—that his children might be kidnapped.

And there was trouble with the law again. Earlier in the year Malik and seven of his followers had been charged with demanding money with menaces from a London businessman—“a local Jewish businessman,” Malik had written to a Black Muslim in the United States. It was a complicated story about an employment agency, a black American, a job, a ring pledged in lieu of a fee. The sum involved was small, five pounds. But the businessman had been led about the Black House in a dog collar, and the case had attracted attention. Malik, for some reason, had written to the New China News Agency asking them to take an interest in the case; but what had appeared “farcical” became less so when in November Malik and five of his men were committed for trial at the Old Bailey.

Flight to Trinidad was now urgent. But Black Power had provided Malik with a complete system; even at this stage he made it fit. He gave interviews; he went on television; and he spoke now like a Black Panther. He was giving up Black Power, he said; henceforth he was going to devote himself to constructive work. He handed over the management of the Black House to Stanley Abbott, a fellow Trinidadian to whom—in the absence of Steve Yeates in Trinidad—Malik had grown especially close during the past year: Abbott of the pale complexion and the dreamy, bruised eyes, five feet six, neat and powerful, with a straight back and immensely muscular arms. Abbott was now thirty-three, fifteen years away from home, with a life already in ruins, with fresh convictions during the two previous years for possessing marijuana, for theft and for assault. Abbott believed that Nigel Samuel had given £250,000; Abbott believed that Malik was rich, and Abbott was loyal.

All was now set for Malik’s flight to Trinidad. Steve Yeates was there, waiting, a bodyguard. But then Malik, remembering the Black Power revolution that had failed in Trinidad, remembering the Stokely Carmichael tapes he had played and the strikers he had marched with, became anxious about how he might be received. One day, playing records to “mood” him, “for this city is full of—and viciousness and I want to feel clean and talk the truth,” he began to write to Eric Williams, the Trinidad Prime Minister. The letter quickly became hysterical, marijuana-hazy, and spread through a long postscript to seventeen pages.

He wrote, as he had so often written, to explain himself. The bewilderment of his early life had turned, with success, to awe at himself; he could put so many patterns on his disordered experience. And now, once again, he spoke of the poverty of his boyhood; of his name of de Freitas (“there was so much dirt with him”); of his Notting Hill success (“I ran the most successful string of Gaming house and Whore houses that any Black person ever did in England”); of his great fame (“I know my name is a household word”: the Patricia East PR proposals “to promote the name of Michael X as a household word” had clearly made an impression on him).

As he wrote, his awe at himself grew. He saw himself “living in danger on the real front line,” and from this military metaphor he developed a fantasy about his life in England:

So many personalities during this last year in England, so many voices: the real man had long ago been lost. Yet, promoting himself as a Negro, he everywhere “passed.”

The Black House, after three weeks under Stanley Abbott, ended in chaos, in a general looting. And with that, Malik’s London career was over. Abbott saw Malik the night before Malik left. From a pile of five-pound notes Malik gave Abbott two hundred pounds. “Liquidized” assets: a glimpse of real money. When later, from Trinidad, Malik sent Abbott a letter with the one word “Come,” Abbott would take the next plane out.

A
FTER
fourteen years his London career had ended in flight, and it might have been thought that he was finished. But Malik flourished in Trinidad as a free man for one year.

Trinidad in 1971 was his perfect setting. Trinidad, with its oil economy, was rich, with a standard of living equalled in South America only by Venezuela and Argentina. Every consumer comfort was at hand, and Malik was soon pleasantly settled in the country town of Arima, in a newish house with a large garden. But Trinidad was far away. In London, Chicago and Toronto, fund-raising centres, Trinidad could pass as an impoverished island where a black leader, fleeing persecution, and also reacting against “the industrialized complex,” might settle down, in a “commune,” to constructive work with despairing blacks, who needed only this leadership, and little gifts of money, to get started in black
agriculture, black fruit-growing. And, later, even a little black fishing: a trawler (obtainable through “contractural relationships with … Schichting-Werft shipyard, Travemuende”) would cost £18,000, but “initial feasibility studies indicate that the profits … would exceed £30,000 a month.” Remote Trinidad held this kind of possibility for its enthralled blacks; all that was needed was the leadership.

And in Trinidad Malik presented himself as a London success. Shortly after he came he sought out Raoul Pantin of the Trinidad
Express.
“He wanted me to do this interview. I was to prepare both the questions and the answers, and I was to make it sound good. He was hiring a skill. His comment when I resisted this was: ‘How do you think I became famous if I couldn’t find people in England to do this for me?’” Some people were also shown a letter purporting to come from an English lawyer, in which the writer said that Malik couldn’t expect a fair trial in England. Malik was also a friend of the famous. The names weren’t always known in Trinidad and could be mangled—Feliks Topol-ski becoming Saponski or Topalowski, painter of the Queen, Alex Troc-chi becoming Trotsky—and there were people who thought that Malik might only be a name-dropper. But the well-publicized visit in April 1971 of John Lennon as Malik’s house-guest stilled all doubts.

He was successful; he had money; he had style. Rawle Maximin was a partner in the car-hire firm Malik now patronized. Maximin is a big, handsome man, half-Indian, half-Venezuelan, with no racial anxieties and no interest in the subject. But his business success, perhaps greater than he expected, now makes Maximin wish he were better educated; and he remembers Malik as someone who never made him feel less than a man.