The Deep and Tragic Midnight

Even in our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, and against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Aeschylus


It began with a long flight on foot. On wobbly legs they did run. On no sleep, in hard light on hard benches, his momma’s hand clutching at his sleeve through the back alleys of Harlem in the dawn. They passed through yawning gaps in chain-link fences. Through vacant lots they did wade. Lost in waist-high Artemisia, on broken palettes they stumbled, on box-springs, foul bedding and heaps of old clothing dropped, strewn, pulled from bulging suitcases now discarded and lying there amongst the spillings of similar escapes. Shoes. Stockings. A one-eyed baby doll that made a strange sound as he stepped on it. A checkerboard. Scalloped photographs of other people pressed into the mud with their dark eyes looking up at him in sad commiseration as they ran together through these islands of eviction and despair. His momma pulled him along in his pajamas and Keds, snaking their way through the alleyways, hop-skipping cross the open spaces, wading through milkweed sprung up through cracks in the asphalt, the sparkling carpets of shattered glass. He stumbled on a soda can and got his leg caught in the rusted spring of a soggy mattress. She bent down to free his foot, crying as she pulled him loose, saying things beneath her breath that he knows now by heart. She spoke the only words she could trust as true. A rhythmic muttering amidst her sobs.

We are on the move, she was saying. We are not about to turn around.

She freed his leg and it was bleeding at his ankle but there was nothing for it and they were running again.

We are on the move, she was saying. We are on the move. Over and over.

Talk and run, talk and run, with his blistered feet and his shoelaces undone and flapping on the sidewalk, click, click, click, click, as she pulled him along on the night of his awakening. Block after block, lot after lot, until suddenly she stopped. He remembers her pressing him against a wall where the gap between two buildings long abandoned formed a narrow chasm of crumbling brick. She held him against the wall, with the palm of her hand, she held him back so as not to be seen, and he could hear her breathing as she peered around the edge, and for a moment there was only that sound. Her breathing. The echo of the blood in her heart. She pulled him out quickly into the street, across to the subway station and they plunged beneath the ground.

He remembers. A long series of rackety trains. Ka-clunk, ka-clunk, ka-clack, ka-clack, air-brake whistles and the high friction squeal of grinding metals. No other sounds to remember. No names spoken. Just words. Freedom. Justice. ReBirth. His head resting in her lap, her trembling fingernails brushing the side of his cheek. Lying face-down across her thighs and feeling for the scar, feeling along the raised seam of her stockings, fingering the hole he found there, the long run in the nylon, until she pushed his hand away from that and turned him over so she could hold his hands and keep his fingers from nervously drumming and look down into his honeycomb eyes, and he look up into her own face where he saw her bruised cheekbones and a booger of blood on the inside of her swollen nose.

It’s gonna be alright, she told him. You will see. We are witnessing in our day the birth of a new age.

Always she did this.

A new structure of freedom and justice.

She soothed him with the words of Martin Luther King, whom he sees daily in his visions, nightly in his dreams.

He dreams dreams, he sees visions, this boy whose name is Malcolm, and who is ten so who is X. He sees behind his closed eyes all the faces, all the hands, all the fingers, scenes and situations, moments and memories, recollections and remembrances, from his father, who was a freedom rider before he succumbed to the bitterness of false prophets and became a soldier in the army of Muhammad, from his mother, who marched with Dr. King and whose very flesh was opened by the mouth of a German Sheppard dog, the scar on her calf raised and jagged like a range of mountains on a topographic map. He sees these things in little clips of dream-like clarity. The biting, the tearing, the fighting. He sees movies of these events. He sees things he cannot possibly know or remember. He sees memories. He feels trauma. His imagination is a projector, a databank, an archive of places and scenes, both living and dead.

Child, you was born in the time of times, his momma told him. What I have seen, and what your father has seen, you have seen, because you were there. Listening from your walled garden. Absorbing it all through an amniotic sea, your own private ocean created by God to keep you from bodily harm. You were eaves-dropping on the troubled world through the thin wall of my belly, and I know you heard it by the way you kicked inside me. You were kicking with me. Oh, how you fought to get out and get going. You fought with me on that day. Yes you did. And you came out early to protect me. You saved me. I know what you saw, she told him. You saw everything I saw.

He saw it, yes, and he sees it still. He sees everything now. He sees things the way they truly are. But it wasn’t always this way.

There was a time when he could lie in his bed at night and close his eyes and see ballplayers. Nothing else. Just ballplayers. Diving for spectacular catches, rolling in the outfield and rising again, miraculous and triumphant, with their gloves held to their hearts as if cradled in their hands was something truly priceless and fragile. He saw them sliding, with their arms aloft in a plume of umber dust. Diving, belly-down, arms outstretched, like grounded men of steel. Or swinging. An utter transformation. From one frozen moment, crouched and closed, to the next explosive burst of reach and spin, arms flung, torso spun, legs splayed, a man’s body released from its coiled self like some trap-spring triggered by a white leather orb flung with full force of hand and body, pitched, in perfect slow-mo, so you can read the break and watch the seams turn and time the cut to send a baseball up, up, up to the stars.

Aaron, Jackson, Clemente, Blue. Such was the roster of his imagination in the dawn of his youth. His momma used to tell him that God gave him his very own TV. And she’d tap him on the forehead with her finger, right between his eyes.
A boy will see much from the world that he wanders. What he is and what shapes he might become. How he takes on names and tries on faces, how he walks in strange gaits, and holds his glove or taps his foot in anticipation of some unexpected event. How he must adopt some other man’s style, a swagger, or a certain nervous tic, to prepare for what will surely come - the sudden approach of some deadly thing flung right at his head. A boy will become what he sees.

He was one thing one day, and suddenly he was another. First it was ballplayers but then it was something else entirely. One day he woke to what this world truly is – no fond ritual of hat tipping and back patting and over the foul line handshakes, no gentleman’s rules of outs and safes, no summery past time of straight white lines and soft green grasses and fine powdery dust. No. When that voice first came to him it set him straight, that great, penetrating voice he heard so many times on his momma’s scratchy records, the prophet, preacher, poet, teacher, just another man of love and peace who blazes up so brightly for a moment on this earth, only to be murdered for bringing to us what seems like the most necessary of things, the purest of things, the most obvious of God’s blessings. This is what they do, his momma told him. Great men come and die, they bear the light of a thousand flaming torches so that we might see this world as the paradise promised, as the paradise delivered, the paradise taken away from us for that one great sin of wanting to know more than we were given. Child, she told him, you will soon know the paradise of fools.

Somehow a switch was thrown. His whole life turned and his dreams, they went south with the birds. He could hear that voice in his head saying, forget now your cracker jacks and your seventh inning stretches. The signs you see are made by old hands and odd gestures and they are far beyond bunt, run and steal. It was King speaking to him. He was sure of it. You are no ball player and you never will be, he said. You are no mere spectator either, enclosed within the hollow confines of some house built by Ruth, no, not wood nor brick, but ectoplasm and blood. You are a memory gatherer, a mind sweeper, a medium through which all the nightmares wrought by that first sin are revealed sharp and sporadic, in cold prismatic waves that you catch with your rabbit ears and your honeybee eyes. Wake up now Malcolm. See.

And he remembers that day. The day of the running. He remembers the moment it all changed, when he reached for that thing he was forbidden to touch. It was just a doorknob. A shiny, crystal doorknob. He turned it.


* * *

His momma told him that a child will become what he sees. A child will become his beginning and choose his own end. But you, she said, you were created in a moment of light and hope on a day of long-awaited jubilation. You were conceived in light but born prematurely into a time of darkness and trouble. Malcolm, you were conceived on the very day the civil rights act was signed into law, but born on a much darker day in the history of this land. And you were born backwards, so that you almost killed me in your coming. Feet first you entered this world, un-rightly you came, upended, too soon. They call such a beginning a breach. And, into the breach you were loaded and from it fired, and thus tempered, and shot out like a human cannon ball who fell to the netless earth wholly unprepared for this living.

Did I request thee, maker, from my clay to mold me man?

His momma, who almost died in his passage, did not see him for three whole days, did not hold him for three long days, did not hear so much as a cry from her first and only child. Such was the depth of her injuries and her sleep, that she missed his baptism and thus surrendered her consent to what he would be named to his father, the once great Elijah Suggs, who deceived her with this ritual of naming - and other acts, and utter lies, and who turned away from the light toward the darkness of militancy and violent means to bitter ends. But that was later on. He betrayed her first through this sacred act of names. For naming is the true origin of things. And his father knew this. He knew that she long wished to honor her own father, the Reverend Arthur Nix, by naming a son after him. Her husband long agreed to this tribute and tradition, and showed no signs of another path, another plan. Thus the beginning of their end was with the son, and on the son, when his father filled out the form that rendered him a person in the eyes of the law, and named the boy Malcolm Xavier. Malcolm Xavier Suggs.

A boy will become.

* * *

He reached out that night with his skinny arm and shaking hand and took hold of that big diamond because it looked so good, a hunk of cut glass in which, at certain times on certain days, he can see himself reflected in its facets like some kind of funhouse mirror. It was something he always had to touch, and that night he knew what he was doing was wrong but those were sounds he could not ignore, coming from behind that doorknob, real voices, real screams, not cowboys and Indians, not Japs or G.I.s, no, these were real people he knew and loved.

That was the first time they rode the subway. O that endless night. His momma and himself, travelling for what seemed like forever on their journey to a place of refuge and light. Shuffling from train to train, going everywhere and no place, waiting for his father to simmer down or pass out cold. She always told him, if you hear him hollerin’, don’t you come in. But that time, he came in. On that night he did listen, and he did enter, and he did see. Behind the crystal doorknob they were having what he now calls a pot fight. Hollow things made of iron, aluminum, tin , half the periodic table, aloft like tiny satellites in that once sacred space.
I can take what he gives me, she said. But I won’t have you here to see it. Run boy, run.

And he did run. When he heard the pots fly he, too , flew. Taking the back steps two and three at a time. Vaulting a pair of trash cans spilled over in the alleyway, he jumps and pivots like a deer when his blood flows with the hot buzz of shame, with all those terrible sounds in his head, the muffled thumps of grapple and chase, the clunks and scrapes of wooden legs on wooden chairs on wooden floors, their shrill voices up in the mix. The sounds of struggle, the sounds of bodies moving together in the ugly, rapid dance of conflict and confusion amidst objects made for rest and reflection, transient things made of paper and wood, made of pulverized pine trees and oaks. Ottomans and sofas, their cascading stacks of great papers and classic books, that fell that day in heavy thumps, that became that day weapons, the books did, projectiles that fluttered, that rattled like kites as they flew, one, two, three struck the door, then the smack, the cry, the metallic tingle of a buckle made of brass, which is copper and zinc, more elements aloft. And then, that heavy thud, the dread sound of voiceless collision marking the culmination of his father’s rage.

* * *

After that night it seemed he was always running. Always waiting for her to come, to join him down there in the subway. Crouching, like some feral thing before the vision of a god. And he, speaking to no man in proximity, summoning a phantom, calling the ghost. Apparition, come hither. Steal this night from mine eyes. Martin. Martin. Martin Luther, do you hear me down here? Speaking to no man living, speaking to the darkness like some stage actor fooled by the conceit of light and lines, performing his own orations to the dank subway station where the smell of piss and ozone blows out from the tunnel-hole on a hot wall of roiling air. When he’s waiting for her in the subway he sees himself in the barrel of a gun. A spinning projectile. What shoots forth from these dark muzzles. Those supersonic rainbow serpents, done up hotly obscene in the glowing spray of some kid’s pilfered Krylon pistols. All goofball names and words of power there spattered – Solly, Mongo, Sliver, Fug. Adjectives and verbs. Dare. Do. Deliver. Elongated. Compressed. Squeezed into lewd shapes like balloon animals, like the heads and bodies from some terrifying Popeye cartoon. These are the true poets of his time. The subway taggers. The wall-painters. The bridge-namers. These strings of words are his leaves of grass.

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform you it is just as lucky to die.

And they know it. And he knows it. He could be one of them if he chose. He knows them all and they know him now. They have names like ballplayers. Skitch. Fozzy. Otto. Duke. Pepper. Sleek. Monk. Philo. Turk. The cat-like man-children who stalk the train-yards in the cold, dark hours of trash-men and paper-trucks. The rattle of chain-link fences, and the steady hiss of compressed air is their requiem of sin. Pushing, pumping, pressing, popping, day-glow purples and organic pinks through a nozzle no wider than a mosquito’s nose. Just to be recognized. Just to be seen. The great nomadic cavern walls of the 70’s. Just to be heard. All funk and ghetto angst; which they will one day speak of as these great canvases of steel and glass, in a distant time, in some cool lecture hall of the future that smells of book-glue and sealing wax. One day there will be a replica made at great expense. He sees this too. There will be an entire train reconstructed in the Whitney or wound, somehow, up the coils of the Guggenheim spiral. A marvelous sight to behold. Look at that, they will say, an old subway train tagged to the BuhJesus. Remember those? Perhaps he will create this exhibit himself. His momma always did tell him he could be anything he chose. She said, Malcolm, you can, be come, any thing you see.

* * *

What he sees. Before him lies a time of darkness, from the great woods of his youth he sees before him a streak of fire, a will-o-the-wisp in the form of a man - white hot and ephemeral, through Chestnut oaks and Broome. He looks to the north of his life and he is chilled by what he sees. From his hidden spaces. The watcher that he is. An observer of truth. A boy should not have to see what he has seen. What they do to each other in his own home, and in all places, turns his soul upside down and he cannot understand, what he sees. The fall of Saigon, a siege in a place called Tehran, a great empire, frozen in a grip of iron, thawing, cracking and separating from itself like pack-ice under an ever-warming sky, and then there are the airplanes, profiles at first, strange-looking silhouettes, black shadows that seem to him like broken crosses, with raked wings, crooked tailfins, a crucifix conjoined, one big, one little, flying crosses, he sees, in this persistent vision, a slow swarm of jetliners bearing West, bearing false prophets, and payloads of human souls toward some terrible conflagration that is but the spark of some future doom.

What can a little boy do to save the world from itself? There are no answers in this lifetime, his momma told him. So dream, she says. Dream Malcolm, dream. That’s what you can do. That’s all you can do. Dream and wait and help who you can. Love who you can. Ask for answers outside words and numbers and cardboard photographs of men you only thought were great because they could run and pitch and time well the swing of some finely lathed ashen bough, men who are nothing now but memories and echoes that vanished in the smoke of your awakening. Find a different man, Malcolm. A different cause. One man to replace them all. This is what I want for you, to float up above all this, to transcend, not just your father’s vision for yourself, or the vision of your namesake, no, but all men who lie and cheat and steal and kill and use their hands rather than their hearts to impose their will upon other men, upon women, upon children, because hands are the great deceit by which we have all been fooled – hands, that can build bombs as well as heal bodies, hands, that can wield fire and chip stone into cutting blades, hands, that got us here, from the cave and the tree to the sky and the moon, O terrible hands, that hammer and slice and club and hit, the hand that sows the garden is the hand that plucked the fruit. Resist the convenient impulses of your hands Malcolm. Don’t rely on them. Don’t trust them. They are the animal in you and they will take you back if you let them, they will seduce you with their power to grab and to touch. To hold. Do you hear me boy? Now go to sleep. Dream now. Pray. Ask for the wisdom and the strength and the courage to transcend your nature. Talk to God and talk to Jesus. And listen. Really listen to what that man has got to say.

So this he does. He prays and he dreams. He summons and divines. He channels and tunes. He asks for signs and second chances and he waits for his moment, like some larval thing buried deep beneath the ground. Burrowing. Tunneling. Boring through the very earth itself as they ride the train, where she holds him in her lap and calls him by her father’s name, quietly, gently. She calls him Arthur, not what his father named him on March 7, 1965, the day of that first crossing of the Alabama River. The day his momma was beaten and bitten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was the day he was born. A mere two weeks after they murdered Malcolm X, there was the start of some other Malcolm, who she now holds in her hands. Her hands, wrapped tightly round his skinny little arms. Her sad and broken hands that did, mere hours before he was born, fend off the blows of other hands much less gentle. Holding his hands now. Rocking him. Singing to him, swaying and singing softly now, with the subway bucking like the kiddie-coaster at the play-land up in Rye. Her hands cold and trembling. A broken nail scratching at his cheek, humming something old and beautiful she tells him was born in the mouths of African slaves. And the train rocks and clatters. And the lights from the windows flash. And the light pans across them both in rapid pulses that come and go with the tunnels and the bright open stations where he can see the dark and wooden silhouettes of lost women and dying men panning slowly left to right, right to wrong, as she holds him and hums to him and says things that he has heard many times before.

No lie can live forever. Remember this. You reap what you sow, Malcolm-Arthur, the arm of the moral universe is long and bends towards justice.

These are words a boy should not have to understand, but that all men, by heart , should know like a prayer. These are words that come right out of his dreams. Words. Dreams. He has been to the mountain-top in his dreams. He has seen the view from up there. He has seen.

The ever-clicking, scratching, skipping, staccato newsreel of black bodies and black faces in the battering spray of fire-hoses, the blur of batons, a mass of men and women, in all their anguished humanity, the rush of human figures pushed down and trampled, the sounds a throat will make when it’s crushed by a boot, how rocks will swarm and hum like bees in the bedtime stories of his younger days that come from no library, no picture books where ducklings waddle or wild things roam, where he sees not red fish not blue fish nor Sneetches bearing the metaphorical stars of racism and hate, he sees those things as they truly are, he sees them happening. Lynch mobs and night riders. A demon army of pointy-headed ghosts, bearing pole arms and side arms and no arms and oil torches, iron tongs and pruning shears, men tied to fence posts with bailing wire glistening with oil, a momma and her boy hovering magically above a placid river with their arms folded and their heads askew, a man burned alive and hung up like a fish, legless, armless no longer a human, no longer a man, and it all comes from the lips of the first man you love. He tells you these things. He paints you these pictures. It’s just old fashioned story-telling from the heart and the mouth. From his father’s eyes, from his father’s mind, from his father’s lips to his own mighty organs of perception.

They turned their dogs loose, a-snarl and a-slaver, his father said this. His father, the first voice of his world.

I lost your momma in a sea of falling bodies. I told her not to come but she wouldn’t hear it. I had her by the hand one moment and in the next, a hailstorm of pop-bottles and hunks of concrete. Whips and pipes. Billy-clubs and rifle butts. They split a man’s head like a peach. And the gas canisters fell. And the smoke came a hissin’ and the wild hoof beats fell among us and there was a rain of hoary frost and broken sighs.

And he becomes the words when he hears them, the boy does. Snarling, raining, hunks and whips. He becomes the feeling of the words. Struggle. Trouble. Turbulent. He inhabits the spaces between the words. He merges with them, he blends into them – napalm, cluster-bombs, landmines that bounce. They call them Betties. He becomes the victims. Evers, Chaney, Goodman, Reeb. He becomes the fear, he becomes violence, if only for a moment, he becomes the hate, he becomes the times.
The deep and tragic midnight that engulfs our civilization.

But always it wanes and he recovers, and he becomes, not the man he hears by his bedside at night, but the one on the old LP records. He becomes the man he envisions. He becomes the prophet, he becomes the deliverer of hope and honest sense that is far, so far from common. He becomes the voice itself, a rising and a falling, a tremolo, the power of a pause. He becomes the man he envisions for himself like some caterpillar dissolved and reborn.

He becomes the woman. The woman who speaks loudly to him now, and all the others still awake on the screeching, shaking train.

I carried you, she says. Inside the warmth of my body I carried you that first time. But we were delayed, weren’t we? She shouts now. Delayed but not deterred. I came back. Yes I did. That second time I carried you in my arms, all the way from Selma to Montgomery. I did. Two weeks later I was up again, and all that time I was never alone. There were two of us all the way. I marched for you. I fought for you. Before the dogs I ran for you. We did that together so we could do this together, she says. And you will not become your father. No. I won’t let that happen. You will not become that man. You will take on the spirit who flows through my heart. You will heed these words.

Nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. She says this with her nasty inflections. A man can know one thing and do another, she tells him with this odd tone of bewilderment. As if the nature of man were something new she had only just now discovered.

A man can speak true wisdom from a good heart and sin just the same, she says. Yes he can.

The people who are on the subway now are not on their way to any place in particular. The people who ride this train at this hour are used to loud harangues. But they watch this woman. They listen to her.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is no deep love. Malcolm-Arthur, she says, not just to him but to all of them. She stands now.

Always remember that you are love. Love is the answer to all our prayers and love can overcome all things dark and terrible.

For a moment she waits. She nods her head. She teeters on her feet and grabs hold of a strap overhead to keep from falling.

Onward they rush toward the bosom of his mother’s soul. Over the rivers and through the woods to his grandmother’s house he goes, lying on his back now, watching streaks of violet on the tunnel wall flare by like shooting stars. He counts the flashes, and he wishes, and he sees a man who runs like the human torch from the pages of a comic book. In these pulsing beacons of light, in this intermittent darkness, he sees a lightning-bug made of purple fire, a superman, a lantern of green, a mighty apparition with a tail like a comet who will come around once more.
He will come around, his momma says. He will settle. Your father. He will simmer up and simmer down, like a pot put up to boil. Your father is a good man gone rotten in this troubled world, she says. That’s all. But he can’t hit nothin’ else no more. I will have no more of this, she declares to all who will listen.

Like the ever-flowing waters of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. But through it all, God walks with us, Malcolm-Arthur. A man’s anger will wind itself up like a spring. That’s all it is, the physics of a spring. But we have the trans-physics of right and hope on our side. Remember, there’s a certain kind of fire no water can put out.

The subway car rattles through the midnight and the lights flicker off and on. Ka-clack, ka-clack through the turbulent beating, the crumbling of rock. The old order slowly disintegrates and becomes new. They are leaving now for the last time. She is determined never to return. Malcolm sleeps and his eyes are a flutter. She sees this, the rapid scan of a soul immersed in dreams. His eyes watching what his mind manufactures from fragments of fear and confusion. A boy with imagination. A boy who never forgets. A boy who still prays nightly at the side of his bed with his head bowed and his hands clasped so that God can see that he is humble and determined. His own explanation, this. A boy who has long abandoned Santa Claus and Easter Bunnies and the fairies of the darkness who grant wishes on a tooth. She asks him what it is he prays for now, what he wants most.

God both evokes and answers prayers.

He says this, a boy, a child who can quote Martin Luther King. Asleep now on the train, in the promised land of his dreams.

* * *

And in his dreams he sees before him a great light of hope. All around him now is that warm glow of rose-colored light he loves to ponder when he’s lying on his back in the sun. The crimson hue of flesh and blood. Solar-tinged vessels like the tiny veins in a leaf amidst swirling specs of amber and gold. He sees the very essence of his self, the entire universe in floating motes of corpuscles and light. He sees the kingdom of brotherhood in the synthesis of good. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates and a young Lincoln. He sees Martin Luther King in a flowing white robe, wading chest-high in a river with his arms raised above the muddy surface and struggling against the weight of worlds and waters, calling for him to enter and be saved. So he enters and is embraced by the arms of Reverend King. Who says, we are baptized not in water Malcolm but in time. Time, which has no power to heal. Time which is not on our side. Time, which is a construct of numbers loosely based on the movements of moons and suns. Time, which does not bring change. Time, which is only a tool like a hammer or a gun. Time. The great destroyer and the great purifier both, the universal solvent of all that is good. Time deceives us, and time erodes us. So now is the time to do. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to do that which God has meant us to do, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

* * *

They are the only two people on the train at this hour. Long past midnight now. Malcolm Suggs and his momma, Althea Nix. Their bodies move in space. Their souls are encased in flesh and bone, subject to gravity and decay and invisible forces they cannot understand. They bounce and sway and lean and slide. They move inside the train and the train moves through the tunnel and the tunnel burrows through, and rotates with, the spinning world, and the world turns, and goes round a sun that is but one among a trillion stars that were born in a momentary flash before which there was nothing but words and the space around the words and no notion of mouths to speak them or books to bear them or minds to define their meanings or hands to render them true. But all this eludes the boy who knows only what the words have painted on the landscape of his heart. He lies in the lap of a woman who gave him life and reads everything his eyes can see. Promises and warnings. Declarations and threats. And he can hear the voice of the man he might become saying, we continue to move on.