B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (28 page)

Once I’d finished copying those words, the Chief began to lecture me on the details of this historical unfolding. His approach was familiar from universal histories, where the world-spirit is seen to animate different civilizations, doggedly aiming at its most exalted expression. He told me that Jewish girls in Israel are crying out for Jewish nationalism; Chinese girls in China were crying out for Chinese nationalism; white girls here in America were crying out for white nationalism. According to this pattern there was only one avenue for the political consciousness of a young woman like me, and it had nothing to do with attending meetings in Harlem, or my vision of going back to my hometown to do community work in Texas.
Damn Harlem!
he told me.
Damn Texas!

By then his tone had abandoned any hush appropriate to a library and ascended the soapbox. Like a practiced rhetorician, he shifted tack, abandoning emotional appeals for empirical ones.
Gold, bauxite, rubber, cobalt, uranium, silver! The natural resources of Africa—that should be your battle cry!
Though I didn’t interrupt, I was, in fact, interested in the natural resources of Africa, especially since I had learned of
the deals between various African governments and various Chinese companies
transferring fishing rights, mining rights, and logging rights, and allowing the construction of
hydroelectric dams, among other forms of resource extraction. I had also learned that the construction of new roads and railways in Africa, while beginning to alleviate the dangers of travel in some parts of the continent, was also funded by the Chinese, in order to better facilitate their program of resource extraction.

The Chief told me that I needed to go to Africa and join the struggle, but he made clear that this struggle was not a matter of attending meetings. I mentioned that perhaps people in Africa did not want me showing up to interfere, and maybe they had their own ideas about their destiny. The Chief said this was part of the problem. Just as the conversion of much of West Africa to Islam had taken place under the threat of death, said the Chief, it was only by threat of death that this process would be reversed, so that Africans would
get in line
with the program delineated by his battle cry. To make his point, he drew another example from history, noting that it was the threat of death that had motivated
50 million Uncle Tom Chinamen to give up Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism
in order to
get in line
for Mao’s Long March. It was only the threat of death, he said, in the form of
Jewish firepower,
that had halted the
killing of Jewish people, the rape of Jewish women, making lampshades out of Jewish skin, experimenting on Jewish babies.
Not having the use of our own firepower, black people were still suffering such traumas. The last affliction, the Chief reminded me, had been exposed in recent years just across the street from the library, when doctors at Harlem Hospital were found to be
using black foster children for unauthorized experimental drug treatments
. He was going on about the A-bomb and its necessity for black liberation when I pointed out that the nationalism asserted by
Jewish firepower
meant the suppression of Palestinian people’s sovereignty. He told me the problems of the Palestinians were none of my business. My business, in case I had forgotten, involved the natural resources of Africa. I asked him
what business was it of Frantz Fanon to travel from Martinique in order to struggle with the Algerians against their common imperialist oppressor, France. His answer was simple.
Fanon was a fool,
he said, sneering. His anticolonial brotherhood with the North Africans was misguided, since it put him in allegiance with the very Arabs who had delivered black Africans into slavery. This point led the Chief to remember his quarrel with my Arabic name, which received a smirking aside before he continued.

All of this was secondary. The Chief thought I was changing the subject and missing the point. I had to
get in line,
he told me.
You only get one shot.

He invoked
the spirit of Winnie Mandela
and told me,
You need to be a part of that spirit!

He invoked
the spirit of Harriet Tubman
and told me,
You need to be a part of that spirit!

He paused and pointed over my shoulder to a painting on the wall, one of several brightly colored works by Haitian artists. It showed the three main heroes of the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe.

After I had looked over my shoulder, the Chief asked me,
Do you know what that represents?
I said that I did, and he asked me to name the figures. After I had correctly identified them he said,
You got that right.

Then he asked me what they had accomplished. I told him they had fought for liberation and he said,
You got that right.

My history being correct, the Chief he didn’t see why I
couldn’t understand the liberation of our people
. I ventured that I did.

The Chief pointed to the button pinned to his shirt; it was a small black-and-white photo of Patrice Lumumba. Continuing my examination, he asked me if I knew who it was. I said that I did. I had even read an article from the African Nationalist Pioneer newspaper, written before Lumumba’s murder, in which
Carlos A. Cooks wrote an editorial, “There Is Going to Be a New Day: Lumumba Foils Colonialist Plot to Partition the Congo.” The same edition also included a poem, “The Awakening Call”:

The poem continues with a plea from a weakened Father Africa,
for centuries his blood having flowed to foreign lands,
crying out, “
Arise Black sons of Africa on foreign soil / Decaying tools of empires created by your blood and toil.
” The sons of Africa are implored to come home and:

The author of the poem is listed as one R. Waldo Williams, of New York. I imagine him as a sensitive, poetic, and politically charged young man, much the way the Chief had described himself to be upon arriving in Harlem from Chicago—eager to answer
the awakening call,
but perhaps not yet free of his artistic aspirations.

But it was not a new day. Congo was partitioned. Patrice Lumumba was spirited away by treacherous countrymen to the breakaway province of Katanga, whose main town was then and is still a mining center bolstered by rich deposits of copper, cobalt, tin, uranium, radium, and zinc, among other minerals. The Belgian-owned mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga had supplied uranium to the United States for the development of the atom bomb.

At Katanga, Lumumba and two companions were executed by a firing squad operating under Belgian command with American knowledge and assent. After Lumumba was murdered, his corpse was buried behind an anthill. Later, Belgian officers returned with orders to destroy the evidence. They exhumed the bodies, chopping them to pieces and dousing those pieces in sulphuric acid also supplied by that same Belgian-owned mining concern. There was not enough acid to consume what was left of Lumumba and his two companions, so what remained of the body that had been
one of the greatest
African personalities to appear on the stage of world affairs today
was set ablaze.

The Chief did not use the small pin on his lapel showing Lumumba’s face as another exhibit in the tribunal on my political commitment. He only mentioned that the murder of Lumumba had happened when he was a young man. He didn’t say anything
more. I figured it was probably the kind of thing that led him to acquire a platform.

I returned to my work, and the Chief went over to the computers where he had an appointment to use the Internet. Once again, the reading room was quiet, so I was confronted by my own silence in the face of firepower, the A-bomb, getting in line, the natural resources of Africa, the revolutionaries of Haiti, Lumumba, Harlem, and Texas. Long after that day I recalled some words of Frantz Fanon that I wished had come to mind at the library, despite Fanon’s having been denounced by the Chief. They express an ideal of physical and intellectual freedom—which means they are, perhaps, the closest I will ever come to having a political platform:

We were protesting on a picket line in front of Melba’s restaurant on Eighth Avenue, a relatively new establishment celebrated for its upscale version of chicken-and-waffles and its ebullient hostess. We were not protesting the cuisine or hiring practices of the restaurant. On that afternoon—just a week after the 125th Street rezoning proposal passed the city council with only two dissenting votes—Melba’s hosted a political fund-raiser for the councilwoman from Harlem who had recently made headlines as a staunch and impassioned defender of her neighborhood. In a speech in City Hall chambers, she had styled herself as a latter-day Harriet Tubman, just before brokering a deal to pass the proposal virtually unmodified from the version put forth by the Department of City Planning. This intervention was lauded because 46 percent of projected new housing would be “income-targeted” for residents of varying incomes. But only 200 of the
projected 4,000 new units to be built on 125th Street would be affordable to that overwhelming majority of Harlem residents who make less than $30,000 per year.

I did not have a notepad and pen, I had a sign. I stood in the picket line, I joined the chants, and I tried to invent a pithy but nonpoetic chant of my own to express the fraud perpetrated by the vote. The council was full of self-congratulation for having passed a proposal with more affordable housing than ever accomplished in previous development plans.
Two hundred units!
I yelled. It didn’t catch on. We all shouted until our voices grew hoarse.

Many people passed by in buses, in cars, and on foot, taking flyers and nodding in support. Most didn’t join the line, but they stood at its perimeter or shouted from cars,
She sold us out!
A group of three young boys came up to ask what was happening. I stood by as one friend explained to them that we were protesting the councilwoman for representing Harlem so poorly. Another protester patiently tried to give a definition of gentrification appropriate for a third-grade level. Taking all of this in, one boy looked at the others and said:
Don’t you know that’s why they’re planting trees on our block?!

Most likely the child had not heard about the
arts-and-culture corridor;
he was not aware of various requests for proposals about monuments that were meant to celebrate his heritage. Most likely he had not been to the “open session” in which invited members of the community and several members of the city’s urban planning staff discussed the intricacies of sidewalk furniture, among other things. (Meetings were held on a variety of subjects; none were held to discuss the question of housing.) But the child had noticed trees turning up where before there had been no trees. He’d seen trees where, before, his presence and the presence of everyone he knew had not seemed to warrant an occasion
for trees. It is possible this child was only mimicking a tone of indignation voiced in his presence by an adult. But is also possible that he knew enough of this place and its landscape—and had observed enough changes in that landscape—to suspect that the new trees, and their beautifying, shade-enhancing, air-purifying qualities, were not necessarily for his own enjoyment or use.