The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad, Page 3

  Revolution, change, system: London words, London abstractions, capable of supporting any meaning Malik—already reassembling his gang, his “commune”—chose to give them. There were people in London who were expecting Malik, their very own and complete Negro, to establish a new government in Trinidad. There had been a meeting; someone had made a record. The new government was going to underwrite the first International University of the Alternative, “the seat of the counter-culture of the Alternative.” Words, and more words: “I cannot go into details,” Malik had said. “But I can say this. The new university will be an experimental laboratory of a new and sane life-style.” But—the eternal warning of the X, the eternal thrill and flattery—the white people who came to Malik’s Trinidad (an airbus service was promised to all international capitals) had to remember that there was “a just hatred of the white man” in the heart of every black; and they had somehow to get over the fact that they “belonged to the race of the oppressors.”

  The leader, the unique spokesman of Negroes dangerous with a just hatred; but the crowds at his trial were good-humored, even gay. No one jeered; he was a martyr to no cause. Only Simmonds, the white woman who had had “total involvement” with Steve Yeates during her six weeks at the commune, only Simmonds, flying down from England, gave the photographers a Black Power salute; but she had a return air ticket. To the Trinidad crowds Malik had become a “character,” a Carnival figure, a dummy Judas to be beaten through the streets on Good Friday. Which was all that he had been in London, even in the great days of his newspaper fame as the X: the militant who was only an entertainer, the leader who had no followers, the Black Power man who was neither powerful nor black. He wasn’t even black; he was “a fair-skin man,” half white. That, in the Trinidad phrase, was the sweetest part of the joke.

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  IT WAS IN LONDON that Malik became a Negro. And perhaps only someone who knew that he wasn’t really a Negro—someone who knew that when the time came he could go off and play another game—could have worked so hard at the role, and so guyed it. He was shallow and unoriginal; but he sensed that in England, provincial, rich and very secure, race was, to Right and Left, a topic of entertainment. And he became an entertainer.

  He was the X, the militant, the man threatening the fire next time; he was also the dope peddler, the pimp. He was everybody’s Negro, and not too Negroid. He had two ideas of his own. One was that the West Indian High Commissions in London paid too little attention to their nationals. The other, more bizarre, was that the uniform of the Trinidad police should be changed; and this was less an idea than an obsession. Everything else was borrowed, every attitude, every statement: from the adoption of the X and the conversion to Islam, down to the criticism of white liberals (“destroying the black man”) and the black bourgeois (“they don’t know the man from the ghetto”). He was the total 1960s Negro, in a London setting; and his very absence of originality, his plasticity, his ability to give people the kind of Negro they wanted, made him acceptable to journalists.

  “Michael X once told me,” Richard Neville writes in Playpower, “that hippies were the only whites his people could talk to.” And Malik was always willing to be instructed in his Negro role. Late in 1965, when he was working on his autobiography (subsequently ghosted by an Englishman, and published in 1968 under the title of From Michael de Freitas to Michael X), he sent the manuscript to an English adviser, and received a long memorandum in reply. “. . . At this juncture you may look at the negro’s relationship with the whiteman throughout the world. Use South Africa, Rhodesia, England, Portugal and America to speak of the heartlessness of white society. Use slavery, use the recent massacre of the Jews at Auschwitz and Belsen. . . . Chapter 15. You ought to close powerfully, frighteningly perhaps, on 'This I Believe.’ Your own true statement of one displaced black man in this particular context of history . . . ”

  So cliché led to cliché. And, inevitably, the racial clichés that Malik was led to, via the “counterculture,” were sometimes prerevolutionary. Once, aiming no doubt at the underground press, he wrote a kind of parable about an Anglo-Saxon called Harold, a Jew called Jack, and a Negro, who was himself. “All we have in common is two hands, two feet a head. I must admit mines are infinitely nicer to look at for their bodies are covered with a sickly pale whitish skin and even they can recognise it for what it is. Harold expressed a desire early in our talk to go somewhere in the sun and transform. I see his point for when he was saying this I followed his eyes caressing my beautiful golden brown skin my inheritance from my African [insertion: and Portuguese] forefathers.”

  It is a “difficult task for three people of as diverse Racial Charisterics as ourselves to truly communicate.” But they are good friends, and agree to talk of their “most secret desires.” Harold the Anglo-Saxon wants to search for truth. “Jacks not as simple as that”: Jack the Jew wants to “make things for people, the people he’s closest to are naturally his own people, Jews he will make whatever they need, money, Clothes, Factories.” And Malik, the Negro, sees “the great divides that exist between us of difirent Races for my own search is one of happiness to create Joys for myself and others to hear Laughter, to give . . . But what a strange dilima this throws us into when I give to him the seeker after truth my humble present and he in his search looks into my little gesture for a deeper motivation or Jack when he makes a garment, and I say how lovely, could I have one and he tells me x Pounds.”

  Malik’s ghosted autobiography was a publishing failure; one of his white patrons bought up most of the copies. The tone of the book is determinedly gay; there are lots of sex and parties—the ghost, easily turning oppressed blacks into abandoned spooks, seems in places to have excited himself with thoughts of a Michael X musical. But it is not an easy book to read.

  It is not the story of a life or the development of a personality. The narrator, from his London eminence as the X, the reformed Negro ponce who is now the Negro leader, assumes that the events of his life are well known; and he is concerned only to present himself in all his Negro roles. Events accumulate confusedly around him; he is without a personality; he is only a haphazard succession of roles. On page 116—at the time of his meeting with an unidentified young property millionaire, who is interested in art—the narrator appears, without warning, as a painter (“my abstracts and surrealist portraits”); and he supports this role for exactly seventeen lines. Equally sudden, equally successful, and almost as brief, are his manifestations as Negro poet, writer, and even as a teacher of “basic English” at something called the London Free School.

  The only other considerable figure in the autobiography is Malik’s mother; and she is as puzzling as Malik. She appears first of all as a ferocious old-fashioned black woman, concerned about appearances and forever preaching the beauty of whiteness. She doesn’t like her son to play with black children or to get his hands dirty; she is snobbish; when she goes to the Port of Spain market she refuses to speak French patois to the marchandes and insists that her son speak English; she sends her son to an “exclusive” school. This is overstated, but it has a certain logic. But then, just twenty pages later, the mother is suddenly a drunkard, hysterical, quarrelsome, wearing appalling Negro-woman’s clothes. One day her son finds her sleeping in the fowl coop, which she says she has converted. Suddenly she is a “hustler”; suddenly, coming to London, she is transformed into a successful and jolly brothelkeeper.

  The childhood of the leader, the rebel who learned to love black, no longer makes sense; the emphasis is wrong. Certain facts about his mother are too important to the narrator for him to leave out. But the facts have been scattered about the picaresque narrative: a pain greater than the one stated is being concealed. When the facts are put together, the childhood of the leader can be interpreted in quite another way.

  Malik’s father was a Portuguese shopkeeper who later left Trinidad to do business on the island of St. Kitts. His mother was an uneducated black woman from Barbados. In Tri
nidad, and especially in the tight lower-middle-class Negro community of Belmont in Port of Spain, she was a stranger, with different manners and a different accent. If she didn’t speak the local French patois it was because she didn’t know it. She was a stranger with a “red bastard,” and she was never allowed to forget it by the black taxi driver with whom she lived. (He used to tell her that all she had got from the Portuguese man was a big cunt and a red bastard. This is not in the autobiography; it was part of Malik’s statement at his trial.)

  The mother was disgraced by the son; the son, growing up in Port of Spain, going to St. Mary’s College (a major school, but not so “exclusive”: the fees were just over three pounds a term), his home life known to all, was disgraced by the mother. She was uneducated, drunken, vicious; they tormented one another. He fled from her whenever he could, going off into the hills with his friends. Once he got all her clothes together and burned them. But she pursued him everywhere with her public scenes, even after he had been expelled from the college, even after he had grown up. He could escape only by leaving Trinidad, by becoming a seaman; at one time he thought of going to live in Guyana. In the end he went to England; but she followed him even there, getting off the boat train at Waterloo in a red bathrobe.

  In 1965, when his London fame was beginning, and when in his own eyes he had made good, Malik began a letter to his mother.

  London, 1st April 1965

  Dear Mamma,

  My hand is shaking and my head hurts, I want to tell you a few things, for I am not afraid anymore, I am a negro, you told me I was different, its not true. I tried to be. I was ashamed not of being a negro but of you. I would like first to tell you what made me write this last year. I was at home and Steve rang me, he asked me if I knew what happened to you, Well you were arrested. At sixty odd years of age for running a Brothel, this I could of tried to understand, I would of blamed anybody for this, the white man, my father, myself, but when you gave your name as de Freitas because as you said you wanted to protect your own name, that was the end. Its x months since that day and I have only just recovered enough to say something about it. I don’t hate you, that is impossible to do, I would like to think that was a thoughtless action but I said all the other horrible things you did were thoughtless too, you have humiliated me once too often, you usually give a lot of thought to things before you do them remember in Trinidad when you were still living with your husband and you threw boiling water on him in bed, you thought that one out didn’t you, you must off . . .

  She had got into bed with the man, and when he was asleep she had got out; she had heated the water beforehand. The incident doesn’t appear in the autobiography. Everything else does; but in the padded-out, picaresque narrative, the passion and the pain vanish, simplified, and vitally altered, to give a smoother account of the boyhood of the leader.

  This letter is the truest thing Malik ever wrote, and the most moving. It explains so much: the change of name from de Freitas to X, the assumption of so many personalities, the anxiety to please. A real torment was buried in the clowning of the racial entertainer. Black Power gave order and logic to the life; it provided Malik with a complete system. He couldn’t write a book; but it was better for him to say, as he does in the preliminary note to his autobiography, that the book was ghosted because black English is different from white English.

  A London journalist who had some hand in the making of Malik says, “Michael took the press for a ride, and vice versa. And out of it grew a monster.” The monster already existed; but there is something in the judgment. Malik was made in England. England gave him friends, a knowledge of elegance, a newspaper fame which was like regard, and money. England always gave him money; no one, for so many good black causes, needed money so badly. It occurred to him, for instance, late in 1966, when his wife was in arrears with her mortgage payments and receiving solicitor’s letters, that West Indians needed adequate representation in the courts. He interested people in this cause. The London Oz of February 1967 announced the West Indian legal need, and in heavy letters at the top of the page prescribed the remedy: “ ‘Defense’ needs money. Send to Michael Abdul Malik, Leith Mansions, Grantully Road, W9.”

  England made many things easy for Malik. But England in the end undid him. Malik exaggerated the importance of his newspaper fame. He exaggerated the importance of the fringe groups which seemed to have made room for him. He was an entertainer, a play-actor; but he wasn’t the only one. He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with “revolution” as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centers of revolution, but with return air tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel. Malik thought he shared the security of his supporters. One day, half doodling (“No Money”), half jotting down memoranda (“Letter from Lawyer”), he wrote: “My inheritance is London—all of it.”

  His fame didn’t last long. It began in 1965, and came to an end in 1967, when he went to jail for an offense under the 1965 Race Relations Act. It was in July 1965 that Colin McGlashan, in a major article in the Observer, told of the existence in England of a militant black organization, the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), with a membership of more than 45,000, that has been created “in near-secrecy” by Michael de Freitas. “Some immigrants,” McGlashan reported, “already talk of Michael X.” It was a good story: “. . . revolutionary fervour . . . near-national organisation . . . formidable professionalism . . . underground technique . . . system of cells . . . financed from donations and Mr de Freitas’s own money . . . organisers, in the best revolutionary tradition, accept a pittance . . . a shy, gentle, and highly intelligent man . . . the authentic voice of black bitterness . . . Says a friend: ‘It is a crime against humanity that people like Michael happen . . .’”

  It was a good story, and if it was a string of newspaper clichés it was only because what was being presented to McGlashan, as a good story, was a string of newspaper clichés. From his autobiography, published three years later, it seems that at the time of the McGlashan article Malik was perhaps more concerned with a beautiful white widow, whom he calls Carmen. Carmen was thirty, “with a lovely, supple body,” and rich. Once she opened her handbag and gave Malik “a bundle of £10 notes”; another time she wrote him a check for £500. He took all that she gave—”I have no doubt that the ponce element produced in the black man by the ghetto was with me that night”—but it was all for the cause, the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Still, he suffered: “My speeches became more and more bitter.” And there was Nancy, another white woman, who was his steady. Carmen had to go. “With the departure of Carmen, RAAS had no more income.” And in four pages, which also cover the story of Carmen, the membership of RAAS drops from 65,000 “on paper” to 2,000 “hard core.”

  Malik loved his publicity. He cut out and filed every reference to himself in the British press, however slight, however critical (the Daily Telegraph must have been his favorite paper). He filed two copies of McGlashan’s article; and when he brought out his RAAS brochure—which was really a brochure about Michael X, complete with press notices (no other name was mentioned)—he used two separate quotes from McGlashan, together with quotes from the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Peace News and the New York Times (“Students, intellectuals, moderates and radicals are all being wooed. Some have already been won over”).

  RAAS was of course a joke. The initials spell out an obscenity which is Jamaican (and not Trinidadian) and is nothing more than a corruption of “arse.” A crude joke, and in the autobiography it is grotesquely extended. “In the first place RAAS is a West Indian word for a menstrual blood cloth. It has some symbolic significance in view of the way the black man has been drained of his life blood for so long. In the second place there is the similar African word ras (from the Arabic ra’s—hea
d) meaning Ruler or Leader.” A “satirical” joke; but it could only have been made by a man who felt that he could, when the time came, withdraw from his Negro role.

  Malik’s Negro was, in fact, a grotesque: not American, not West Indian, but an American caricatured by a red man from Trinidad for a British audience. West Indians are not black Americans. American blacks are an excluded minority. West Indians come from countries with black majorities and black administrations; they have a kind of political tradition. Boscoe Holder, a black Trinidad dancer who was in London at the time, says, “When I heard about this X guy I thought, ‘There goes one of our con men.’ And I wished him well, because he was in England and because they told me he was Trinidadian.” It was the West Indian attitude: the jester was recognized and accepted as a jester, but was otherwise kept at a distance. Occasionally Malik’s publicity excited a student or a writer or a politician. In 1965, after the McGlashan article, the leader of the Trinidad opposition—mainly an Indian party—thought of asking Malik down to Trinidad to help with the elections.

  But Malik never held these people. And in London he didn’t really need them. A West Indian Malik had already met—and who was eventually to act as his political deputy—was a young Trinidadian called Stanley Abbott, like Malik a college boy who had dropped out, and like Malik a red man with Spanish or Portuguese antecedents (Abbott sometimes called himself De Piva). Abbott had come to England at the age of nineteen in 1956, and was very quickly adrift in London, a lost soul, adding and adding to a police record: willful damage in 1956, breaking and entering in 1958, Borstal and supervision between 1958 and 1962, assault in 1964.