The Lost Brother (13 page)

“The problem is that black Americans have become a people of hate. Go see a movie made by blacks, watch a video made by blacks, listen to music made by blacks, read the lyrics. It’s all about hate and violence. Black kids are brainwashed into thinking that we hate them. Brainwashed into interpreting our behavior as racist. Brainwashed into bigotry. Brainwashed into thinking violence against us is justified.

“Never mind that ninety-nine percent of all interracial crime in this country
is from
blacks
to
nonblacks. Never mind that more whites will die at the hands of black criminals this year than blacks were lynched by whites in a decade in the Old South. Never mind that one hundred percent of black economic inferiority comes from the fact that they are the worst parents in the world. Never mind that black people have
always
lagged behind everyone else in the world and that it
can’t
have anything to do with racism because blacks were behind everyone else
before
whites came to Africa, which is how they ended up being bought for slaves in the
first
place. Never mind that Africans were the ones who invented slavery, and African chieftains sold their own people, and our European ancestors were the victims of the greatest con job in world history. Slavery was the worst thing to ever happen to this country. Africans sold Africans to Europeans, and centuries later their descendants are angry at
us
!”

That may have been the riskiest thing she will have said tonight, so by strategy she follows with her most powerful language:

“Never mind that my husband”—she chokes up, and the audience is completely silent—”was a good, open-minded man who believed we should stay in our neighborhood even though it had turned almost entirely black.

“Never mind that our daughter”—tears fall down her stern, angry face—”had a black girl for a best friend.

“Never mind what we do, or how we feel. When the time comes, when the blacks come, it doesn’t matter how good we are. So many of us thought, if we were
good
whites, somehow we’d be protected.”

Pause.

“Yet
every
day in
every
city in this country, blacks mug, murder, rob, and rape us.”

She breathes deeply, passionately, loudly. Holds her hand to her temple and forehead, eyes closed a brief moment in concentration, collection. She opens her eyes, looks imploringly to her audience.

“How many people here have been victimized by black crime?”

Some hands go up.

“How many people have had loved ones victimized by black crime?”

Everyone’s hand goes up.

“Then help us. Help the only true civil rights group in this country. Help us fight New Africa, the Nation of Islam, the N-double-hate-C-P, the Black Congressional Klan, and the other hate groups that are destroying this country. Help us save your lives.”

Passer, looking her whitest, in jeans and boots, a ponytail wig under a ball cap, skin paled with makeup, and Kellogg, who’s white as can be naturally, are in the audience, in the back.

Passer whispers to Kellogg, “She is awesome.”

Kellogg nods.

Passer says, “I mean, I have never seen a woman speak like this. I’m not talking about right or wrong. I just mean, she can
speak”

Kellogg nods again.

Jimmy Close called him today and suggested tonight as a good opportunity for Kellogg to begin investigating LTC. After all, the only provable connection between Richard Ells and LTC was Ells’s attending a meeting such as this one.

After her speech, after an hour of talking with supporters, with reporters, with newcomers, Joan is finally alone, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Passer comes up to her. Speaks in a heavy New Orleans accent she learned during her stay there. Puts out her hand.

Passer: Mrs. Price? I’m Adelia Desormeaux.

Joan Price takes the proffered hand. Shakes it. Looks Passer in the eye.

Passer: Mrs. Price, I just have to say, my God, what you said all tonight, it is just something I have never heard so well before.

Joan: Thank you. Adelia Desormeaux? Passer: Yes.

Joan: Thank you. We haven’t seen you before, have we?

Passer: No, this is my first time, but I had to come, because I read about you in
Time
magazine, and then heard you speak on the radio, and saw you on Ricki Lake and Geraldo, and I just had to come.

Joan: Thank you. I hope that means you’re going to get active in the movement.

Passer: Absolutely!

Joan: Great. Do you have any background in political activism?

Passer: Yes, I do. I worked on David Duke’s campaign back home. It still hurts me we came up just short on that, but still, you know, we got some things said.

Joan: You’re from Louisiana?

Passer: New Orleans.

Joan: I thought I recognized that accent.

Passer: Ain’t much mistaking it for nothing around here.

Joan: No, there isn’t. It’s a great accent. Passer: You never meet no one from home ever makes the least bit effort to talk like the rest of y’all. Joan laughs.

Passer: Anyway, Mrs. Price, I just think what you say and do is so right, and I want to be a part of it. I came up here just for that. I want to work with you.

Joan: You came up here to work with me? Really?

Joan Price is still new to her own power. She still enjoys, like a revelation, hearing that people are moved by her speeches.

Passer: I got thirty-three hundred dollars to live on for a while, and I can stay rent free in Frederick with my uncle.

Passer points to Kellogg, who, across the room, his huge belly sprawling out from under a T-shirt, over his jeans, looks as much a redneck as anyone ever does. His T-shirt says
PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN ABORTION SHOULD HAVE BEEN ONE
.

Passer: Well, I don’t mean to gush. Or keep you. I know you must be so busy, so many people demanding your time.

Joan Price smiles up at Passer. Asks if she’s hungry. Passer says yes, very much so. Joan says, Come eat with me. Passer asks if her uncle can come too, and Joan says certainly.

Earlier this day, Passer and Kellogg went out to Frederick and borrowed a truck, with Maryland tags that can be traced to a Frederick address. The man who owns the truck is a retired police officer, an old friend of Kellogg’s named Desormeaux with a daughter named Adelia, so they can get by a casual check, if Joan runs one.

MIGHT, AT THE TASTEE DIMER IN BETHESDA. The temperature has dropped, and a slight rain falls, misting the windows. Joan Price has brought a tall, sharp-eyed young blond man who takes his job as her bodyguard very seriously. He sits with them all at the diner but doesn’t join in the conversation much. Stares at Passer a lot.

The conversation at first is indirect. Passer, who’s done some library research on the subject, speaks about the David Duke campaign; Joan Price is very interested. Passer says she answered phones in a New Orleans office for a month and did some leaflet distribution, and poll work on election day. She has actually done those things as a kid for one of Tom Bradley’s mayoral campaigns in Los Angeles, so she feels comfortable discussing the work. And she has seen Duke speak on C-SPAN.

“You know what I remember most about the David Duke campaign?” Joan says. She’s eaten amply and is drinking coffee. She doesn’t smoke. “You know, blacks are always talking about redemption, but they aren’t willing to give anyone else any. They say forgive the Mayor, forgive Tyson, forgive Farrakhan, but don’t forgive David Duke. Tell me, Adelia, do you know anything about Malcolm X?” Passer: I saw the movie.

Kellogg, who’s been busy eating, says, “I tried to watch it when it was on cable, but I turned it off after about thirty seconds—as soon as that nigger started preaching that white-hating bullshit of his.”

Joan, pointing her finger at Kellogg, sternly says, “We don’t use that word. Period.”

Kellogg: They use it. All the time.

Joan Price: I don’t care. I don’t use it, and I can’t let people around me use it.

Kellogg shrugs his big shoulders.

Passer: It just gets us in trouble.

Price: Exactly. We have to be more careful about such things than anyone else. We are held to a higher standard. If we say we prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate, we can be accused of racism. Getting back to Malcolm X, he is someone I understand very well, but with regard to David Duke, remember that Malcolm, too, at first said horrible things about whites, but we are supposed to overlook them because at the end of his life he started changing his views. He was still a separatist, as I am, but he realized the futility of hate. As I do.

Kellogg: And as soon as he stopped hating whites, the blacks killed him.

Price, nodding: That’s true. And it’s also true that blacks today idolize Malcolm because, as a young man, he was a racist fanatic. But understand, thirty years ago things were very different in this country. If you know history, you know there was a time in this country when it was whites who were the violent racists, whites who organized politically along racial lines, whites who got away with crimes if their victims were black, whites who got job preference so absolute that it makes affirmative action look like nothing. I always try to bear this in mind when I think about succumbing to my own anger.

Passer: I remember you said it’s important not to let blacks drag us into the gutter of racial hate with them.

Price: That’s right. You know, I used to be a liberal. People wonder why I’m so good at slicing liberal arguments. It’s because I know those arguments so well. But now liberals are the status quo, which means they aren’t really liberal at all. Empowered liberal whites still feel superior to others, but they’ve added poor and working-class whites to their list. Empowered whites are liberal only inasmuch as they’re scared to say anything that can be construed as anti-black. Here’s another thing I have in common with Malcolm—we both detest white liberals. In the same way he had more respect for the openly anti-black Southern whites of his time than he did for the Yankee phonies, I have more respect for black nationalists than I do for white liberals. In fact, I
agree
with black nationalists.

Passer: I know you agree with New Africa.

Price: New Africa is a great idea. African Americans are Americans. They’ve lived here for hundreds of years, fought and died in wars to keep us all free. They aren’t Africans, they’re African Americans. They have as much right to be here as anyone else. New Africa’s idea of carving out a country for blacks is fine by me. I don’t want to live with them anymore.

Kellogg: Me, neither.

Passer: Yeah.

Passer and Kellogg did some homework on Joan Price and LTC, and knew in advance the necessity of agreeing with the idea of New Africa.

Price: They say they want Georgia and South Carolina. It can be worked out. We can even give them, say, twenty billion a year for the first ten years, so they have some operating capital. Forgive them their share of the national debt—even though if it weren’t for blacks there wouldn’t
be
a national debt, because it’s their failure to join the economic mainstream that is the cause of all our problems.

Kellogg: What if some blacks don’t want to go?

Price, laughing: Well, you couldn’t blame them, but even if only half go, that still cuts our black population in half. And whites who want to stay in Georgia and South Carolina I’m sure will be welcome, as long as they understand they’re going to be in the minority.

Kellogg: The thing is, you know black people can’t run their own government. Look at what they did to D.C. They can’t run things.

Price: Of course. All the laws and hate quotas in the world can’t change the fact of the bell curve. But as long as they’re out of our hair, who cares? Think about how nice it would be not to have blacks around. Our schools would work again, because the disrupters would be gone. Our cities would be safe, which would free us to live with culture and civility like they do in Europe. Our tax rate would drop, because we wouldn’t have so many millions of blacks to support. It’s paradise. Of course New Africa would fail. Blacks have about as much chance of running their own country successfully as the Japanese have of winning a gold medal in basketball, and for the same reason. But that wouldn’t be our concern. We separate from blacks. Give them their own country. Build a wall around it so they can’t sneak back in here. And presto—paradise! Kellogg: Sounds like a plan.

Price: And it’s their plan too. Funny how I’m called a racist for agreeing with them. It’s true, there is a part of me that wants revenge on blacks for what they’ve done to me, to us all. You know, Africans butchered, conquered, and enslaved Europeans for a thousand years. The Moors, the Arabs. What Asian Mongols did for centuries to whites in Russia was worse than anything we ever did to anyone. We’ve been terribly victimized by other races. In fact, blacks still owe us a few hundred years of servitude, as I see it. And reparations for the destruction their affirmative hate has caused us all these past decades, and their current genocidal crime war against us. But I’m willing to forgive and forget, as long as I don’t have to live with them anymore.

Kellogg: Yeah. Who knows. Maybe if we go our separate ways, we could even be friends.

Price: For better or worse, we do have a long history together. It could be like a constantly fighting married couple who get along better after the divorce.

Passer: What about the Asians and the Mexicans? There’s getting to be too many of them too.

Kellogg: And the Jews.

Passer: Yeah, and the Jews.

Price: They’re all all right. It’s just the blacks who can’t get along with anyone else. They riot against Koreans in L.A., Cubans in Miami, Jews in New York. They’re the problem. You know, the government did a study and found out that blacks were two and a half times as likely to get disciplined on the job than whites, Asians, or Latinos. Blacks are always saying it’s a white racist society, but if we’re so racist, how come Latinos and Asians don’t get disciplined any more frequently than whites do? Face it, we aren’t racist. Asians, Jews, Arabs, Latinos, they all do fine here. Even African immigrants do well here, so it isn’t color. It’s just black Americans who are failures, which proves it isn’t us, it’s them that’s the problem. They’re choking to death on their own bigotry, not ours.