Chapter 9

The Minister Louis Farrakhan, bedecked in a black two-piece suit, azure bow-tie, and rectangular glasses took the podium in front of a crowd of one hundred followers at the National Press Club. Claude Carolina, watching this event on cable television, could scarcely believe that the honorable minister, plagued by a mysterious illness, looked as though nothing at all touched him during his prolonged absence from the national stage. The minister’s walnut skin and jet black hair hadn’t changed, and neither did the cadences of his voice, almost like music it was—a beat here, a rhyme there, all part of his oratorical brilliance that accompanied a hard-hitting and heretic ideology that challenged what most people in America thought and felt about the September 11th attacks.

Here was a man who didn’t shy away from what he considered to be the truth—that the government itself initiated the attacks in order to support Israel in its drive to push the Palestinians out of their rightful homeland, that the United States government, in all its posturing about the so-called war on terrorism, actually shot itself in the foot for a new and prolonged war in the Middle East, if only to keep the military in business, if only to keep the Texan oil men happy, and to wipe out any idea of new sources of energy other than the same old black gold for home heating and the continuous line of gas- guzzling SUV’s. Claude figured that Farrakhan articulated what a lot of people had on their minds already, and that this entire war was nothing but a tall-tale, a sham, a hoax, a farce, if only to serve deviant interests. And after Farrakhan pontificated on these conspiratorial intentions of the U.S. government, after reading a long letter delivered to President Bush after the September 11th attacks, he turned his sights to Armageddon, the hovering dark cloud that would engulf this world if this new war continued. He asked that African-American men do what is in their best interests, which meant avoiding the draft, if there was to be one, and making a list of demands to the Democratic party which most blacks “had been sold to.” Farrakhan said that he wouldn’t vote for either candidate in the upcoming elections, as voting for one of them would be voting for the lesser of two evils. And with each sonorous sentence flowing out of the honorable minister, Claude couldn’t help but admire the man, because somehow he wasn’t concerned about who liked him and who did not. He wasn’t concerned about what was appropriate and what was not. He spoke of that which held the greatest truth regardless of the consequences. Of course, this could be expected from Farrakhan who was no stranger to controversy, and after answering the last question from the audience, after defending his most ardent supporters such as Qadafi and Arafat, he forcefully called for his enemies “to get him,” and by this he must have meant the white neoconservatives on whom he blamed the entire war: this preconceived, pre-planned menace that took the American population by surprise. Farrakhan, it seemed, was not fooled by all the wartime posturing and all of the propaganda handed down to veteran reporters from the highest echelons of the Washington establishment. Information was in fact a two- step process after all, and it didn’t really matter what the reporters thought, just so long as they remained moderate to conservative, and just so long as someone in the government talked to them, so that they could collect their paychecks and continue handing down the same wartime propaganda. As far as September 11th was concerned, it was the oldest trick in the book, and most Americans fell for it.

But Claude was very hesitant to go along with Farrakhan. Allegations of anti-Semitism and past statements that demeaned the Jewish people followed the Minister wherever and whenever he spoke. Claude did not think the Jews were responsible for 9/11—American neoconservatives perhaps, but not the Jews, and with Farrakhan one never knew whom he would blame next, his dogma as contrarian as his collection of silk shirts and bow-ties, his rhetoric as powerful as any demigod. With Farrakhan the proof followed the thought, the idea, or the concept. If the concept fit, then that would be presented as his particular brand of truth, and what a better and more convenient way to organize the masses of black folk than a broad-based distrust of the white race, from which any number of divergent truths were possible.

Claude had already been distrustful of them, ever since he roamed the halls of South Orange high school. The manner in which they confiscated his family, both their hearts and minds that were somehow devoted to and in tune with white histories, white interpretations, and white values and beliefs, became a constant source of strain. His father wanted him within the white world, not the black one. And despite mixing it up with Amanda and Preston, the ones who promised him fields of gold, he still could not kill his distrust of them. If anything, Farrakhan enflamed such a distrust.

Farrakhan called for a unity unprecedented among those who understood the deviant intentions of the white race, and yes, they were deviant when they wanted to be. Perhaps this man was the only Muslim in the world able to articulate the feelings of millions of disenfranchised black men, as though Farrakhan himself played a game of chess with the stuffing in Claude’s skeptical head. Claude, in fact, didn’t know what to believe. He was scared, though, that Farrakhan had touched him in such a manner. The Minister called for men of conviction to fight against these white neoconservatives, these menacing whites who never had the will to step outside of their own race. And a horrible perspective it was—these undisciplined white animals taking up space, getting the women they wanted, and really, who could deny that this was the source of Claude’s distrust—not the war in the Middle East or Farrakhan’s contrarian statements, but his inability to win the white girl without having to turn himself inside out. He had seen in high school how easily these white women fell for the most despicable of white males, the ones who were just like him, the ones who were unruly, the new generation of low-lifes and ditch-diggers, the kind that got all the pussy they wanted without lifting a finger, all of it reinforced by the slick white-owned media not giving a damn about Claude or his secret journey into a white girl’s heart.

In Amanda Larson he envisioned all that he wanted, as she was the real reason for his general angst. No one had ever called him good-looking. He was ugly among the sea of whites inhabiting his daily skull. This terrible kernel of a woman rested within him, nestled there like a blocked artery that would otherwise lead him back to his own race of people—a black man locked in the ghetto, the black girl he never got pregnant, the basketball team he never took a liking to. The damn white woman, or at least the image of her, propagated by all sorts of media invention, turned him against his own race, and suddenly this handsome black minister told him that he should follow his instincts and hate as well?

‘Damn her,’ he thought as the Minister on the television screen left the stage and bid everyone peace under the glory of Allah.

It didn’t matter, did it, that Claude Carolina fell for a white professor? That a raging war threatened yet another minority people, people of color at the mercy of unruly and undisciplined white men bound for a hedonistic treasure that one never gets but only chases like the visions of grandeur flashed upon the television screen? It was the white man’s ultimate colonization of every bit of spare land, no matter how useless, no matter how saturated with the black gold. Claude had the opportunity of a lifetime with Preston at his back, with Amanda within the tender folds of his mind, a mind that would have normally succumbed to a rage unknown. This was the extent of his knowledge through years of writing tired lines—to fight them and continue fighting, until they finally knew the meaning of enslavement.

Yet they were not a bad people. The route to a woman’s heart sometimes takes the wild and irrational twists and turns that only madmen can understand, and he would hate an entire race of people in order to win her. He would use something as potent as “the lack of opportunity” and past injustices to achieve her. He longed for Amanda Larson, even while sitting in his bedroom watching C-Span, even while hating an entire race of people for their ease at influencing her. Luckily he had class later that afternoon, and he would stop at nothing to please her, his paper on Sylvia Plath lifeless on his desk nearby, the only link, he thought, to a relationship with a woman who wove her way into an otherwise impregnable heart.

Claude purchased a pair of non-prescription glasses from the pharmacy to go along with a new look he’d been constructing. He also bought a pair of thick-whaled corduroys and a couple of polo shirts from the Short Hills Mall on his last visit there. He traded in his drooping jeans, high-top sneakers, and spandex do-rag. After writing the Plath paper, he made a conscious decision to depart from the slam poetry scene. Like the movement from old school rap in the 1980s to Hip-Hop in the 1990s, so Claude believed that slam poetry, at best, was only a trend that had lost its currency with the real world of poetry and scholarship. He was college-bound now, and it was high time he grew up a little, and at the end of the day he hoped to win the girl, and in no way would she have a man who looked like a street kid. He hated the idea of dressing like his brother Monty, because really he wasn’t acquiescing his hardened mind to the white world as his parents had done. But considering the Plath paper and all of the white poetry he had been investigating for several weeks now, he found a kinship with these wayward white poets, even though his experiences were totally different from theirs.

Amanda opened his eyes to these poets—the age of Dryden and Pope, The Romantics from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Byron, Keats, and Shelley, the Fireside Poets, the Transcendentalists, Dickinson and Whitman, (oh how Claude loved Walt Whitman), and suddenly Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and dare did Amanda introduce him to even more Maya Angelou, because this poet had the privilege of crossing over, and on this hot afternoon he prepared for a lecture on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, their turbulent love affair ending in the poor woman’s suicide.

Amanda had actually suggested Claude read Hughes’ “Birthday Letters” which ended Hughes’ thirty-year silence on the subject of dear Sylvia. Claude bought it after their last class together, and while he hadn’t delved into the book yet, he did place it in a revered spot on his bookshelf as an indirect link to Amanda, her broad intellect and poetic vision weaving its way into his bedroom adorned with posters of famous athletes and rap groups. The posters had to come down, by the way. He was no longer interested in childish things, such as rap and hip-hop, but instead the more refined, acquired tastes that suited a man worthy enough to date his first college professor.

In the fall he expected to see more of her. He wanted more from her already, more attention, for instance, more happy smiles reserved for puppy dogs, he imagined, and the radiant glow of her smile that said Claude had come a long way in a very short time and was now ready to tackle more complicated work and write longer poems (this time in the King’s English and not Ebonics), to become a part of some poetic movement beyond his understanding, and of course graduate from college so that the powers that be could finally put him in front of the television cameras and open him to his fans. He almost forgot where all of this was heading, so he couldn’t abandon slam poetry just yet. He would leave the posters on the walls if only to remind him that he had an obligation to uphold, a contract with Preston Whitcomb to finalize, before doing away with his past and moving more mainstream into the mixed up and mongrel multicultural world where he could keep Amanda as his woman of choice and still get away with it.

He looked himself in the mirror and made sure that today he looked like his father would have liked him to look. He had enough of the tough-boy, street-kid act, enough of the internal rebellion. He looked decent for a change, a young man just out of Sunday services, his new glasses sitting smartly on the bridge of his nose, his hair without corn-rows, an inch-thick afro in its place. He even planned to borrow his mother’s car instead of the old, adolescent dirt bike he thought he’d keep until his last dying day.

He examined his black skin, the deep pores created by stress and anger, the curly stubble of hair on his chin, his straight set of teeth—the only thing white about him, and he wondered why the black man had to be the most ridiculed being on the planet, especially in the eyes of the women he desired. They were taught to stay away from his kind for fear of being raped, tall-tales by enemies who could never get along with his innate brand of reasoning. He looked in the mirror and gazed at himself in his new uniform and could not, for the life of him, consider himself beautiful as others considered themselves beautiful. It would take a rebellion, a total conquest of the media, all-out racial warfare, to declare his skin the rightful successor to Western beauty. Forget whether or not the current or future generations were responsible for what their parents did in the past—the only rectifying force that made his ugliness beautiful would be a total usurpation of white dominance in favor of a more benevolent and at least a more communicative black version of what was beautiful. He hated himself for thinking this way—a kind of power-play against the rest of conventional wisdom. Nevertheless he wanted to be beautiful in her eyes, and lately he wasn’t sure if she would discard him just for being black. Lately people were unable to see beyond the color of skin, a mere assumption on his part, but an assumption that seemed to hold true. He asked himself how he could rise above or at least differentiate himself from all of the other black men on the street and wondered in the same vein whether or not it was worthwhile sticking to his own race instead of venturing into the land of the forbidden.

In a flash of what he considered to be brilliant he understood the subtle system at work—or, in other words, how these matches were engineered. It was more scientific than just superficial attractions that made a black man’s skin color unattractive or, in rare cases, attractive to white women. He pictured a female egg under a microscope and all of the little sperm swimming and pushing to break the barrier of this egg. There are literally thousands of wagging sperm trying to get inside, and usually only one lucky spermatozoa makes it, or in some cases two, which would mean twins. He then compared this one egg to Amanda and the thousands of little wagging sperm to the thousands of men pursuing her. And only one, maybe two, can get inside. ‘Now how much do you want to bet that a black man is kept outside with all the other Negroes wanting to get inside,’ he asked himself, ‘and only a white man can get inside?’

Yes, there was something mysteriously scientific about the entire mating process, something mysteriously genetic that kept the two races apart, somewhat equal but apart. Claude, being an integrationist, now that he fell for a white woman, felt like one of a million struggling sperm to be number one, and it just doesn’t happen that way. It really doesn’t. The women wanted men with money in their genes—looks, money, a strong family, a nice house, all of that. It had nothing to do with love or attraction, but more to do with the science of mating. No one was in it for love anymore anyway, nor were women in it for personality or charm. They would take a dull, boring, filthy- rich white guy over an interesting black man any day, only that Claude couldn’t live with this, and while looking himself over in the mirror, a new emerald-green polo shirt covering his black skin, he vowed never to let up in spite of insurmountable odds. Science may very well have been poetry in motion, but such a poetry can easily be resisted in favor of more equitable verse, and like anything else, science could be revised to suit his goals and objectives, much like asking another doctor for a second opinion. But on this planet Claude had no such luck yet. He hoped the Sylvia Plath paper would be the bait that reeled her in. Perhaps he would read it aloud in class.

His mother drank coffee at the kitchen table downstairs, and he hoped to avoid her. No one had ever seen him this way. The last time he properly dressed was for his father’s funeral. He crept carefully down the stairs, his backpack dangling from his forearm. He heard his mother flipping through channels, and then arriving at a talk show, hands clapping, two teenagers who dress promiscuously at school yapping, that type of talk show. Just when he landed on the last step, his mother called out:

“Claude, you come in here right away!” He pretended not to hear.

“Claude? Is that you? Don’t make me come after you.”

He could have bolted from the house but instead surrendered to his mother’s adamant tone. Under her roof he would always be the youngest child. He couldn’t wait for the day when he’d have his own place, his own privacy apart from his family. Who knew when this would be. Resignedly he stepped into the kitchen in front of his mother’s gaze.

“Boy, what have you done to yourself?”

“I’m getting late, Mom.”

“Let me have a look at you,” she smiled. “I never thought God would answer my prayers, but thank God—you actually put on a decent shirt today, and your hair! Oh, Claude, is this really you? What has gotten into you?”

She hugged him and patted his head.

“I’ve got to go, Mom.”

“Not without breakfast. Also I’ve got to take a photograph. Hold on a minute.”

“Awww.”

She took several photographs of her newly minted son. She used a digital camera. Hopefully she wouldn’t send his picture through cyberspace, but he had little say in the matter as he ran out the door with her car keys.

“We’re having dinner tonight, so be home by six o’clock,” she called.

Dinner with the family was the last thing on his mind as he drove to the university, the Plath paper tucked away in his backpack like a bar of gold. He figured it was the key to her heart, his passport to an extended relationship with her. She would surely agree to go to the poetry slam with him that evening, a celebration, perhaps, of his transition into her world. And he would be damn sure to speak perfectly, learn the rules of grammar, and read even more white poetry. He had already decided to do this in order to obtain her, because with each day that passed he wanted her more, a secret he had kept to himself, locked away in the cloisters of his heart. No one could ever know of this peculiar fascination with her. He guarded it fiercely and promised to tell no one or else forfeit this most sacred dream.

The warm and stuffy classroom could not contain his anxiousness. The poetry workshop waited for their teacher to arrive, and Claude sat in the front of the class this time, as opposed to where he normally sat, which was in the back row, distant but out of sight. He counted on Amanda noticing his new look. Even a few of the students smiled. He was at the center of attention, at the point of nakedness and vulnerability in the gaze of the other white students. It wasn’t at all like being on the stage in a dark and noisy nightclub. He harnessed an unusual power when he rhymed of a street knowledge no one in the audience understood, and suddenly the tables had turned. Now a white woman would lecture him, and he would partake in their knowledge and learn from them. He saw this incredibly long road ahead of him, each step an awkward and anxious foray into mistakes and humiliations leading to the grail of white knowledge, the road lined with crowds on either side of him— mocking him, taunting him, helping him, perhaps some of them cheering him on. He recalled the many terrible things he had said about the white race, countless jabs and insults that pitted them as an enemy to his people, and maybe he had gone a little too far in his castigation of them, all because he was always a nobody at their doorstep, knocking fiercely but never allowed in, not by anyone.

He took the Plath paper out of his backpack. In exchange she would go to the Newark slam with him. But he didn’t want to go to the slam anymore. That was his past life, and he didn’t want to return to it. Never in his life did he feel so helpless and lost, a confusion as acute as someone performing brain surgery on him. Then he thought that his father’s genes must be kicking in, all of his genetic memory about white people and their teachings dumping on him, reshaping his rebelliousness into an attitude more refined, quiet, and studious, and dare he think appropriate and acceptable and conforming.

When Amanda walked in, he was in the middle of proofreading the Plath paper. She had been stuck in traffic along South Orange Avenue and apologized for her lateness. She wore a white cotton sundress that flowed to her ankles, her neckline exposed to the sunlight and shade of the classroom. She immediately smiled to Claude who smiled back and waved his paper in front of her.

“My, you look different today,” she said.

The rest of the class nodded in agreement.

“It’s this Sylvia Plath stuff,” he said.

“Y’know, that doesn’t surprise me. The more I read her, the more I change.”

“She was very dark, though. Like in her poem, The Mirror, she takes a very dim view of her looks, like she has a bad self-image of something. You don’t feel that way, do you Professor Larson?”

“It’s also about getting older.”

“She drowns herself, right? The woman?”

“I don’t know. Does she?” asked Amanda of the class.

“I think it’s metaphorical,” said one of the white students. “Each day she’s looking into the lake, and over time she’s becoming an old woman. Claude’s reading it too literally.”

“See, I think she’s about to drown herself,” said Claude, “but doesn’t have the nerve to. This woman has serious issues. She’s always crying over the lake. It’s sad to read. If I were her boyfriend, I’d lift her up and say look—’I’ll care for you. I’ll protect you. You don’t have to go through life this way. I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”

“And what if love isn’t enough?” asked Amanda, untangling her books from her bag.

“My love is always enough,” Claude said in a quick retort. “If this woman gave me a try, she’d never drown in that lake.”

“What if she’s not interested in love anymore? What if love for her has already lost its meaning?”

“That’s because she hasn’t tried the best before. She doesn’t know what love is yet, because she hasn’t been with me.”

“What if being with the wrong man precipitated her poor self-image? What if love betrayed her, even though she found the right man?”

“I would never betray her like that,” said Claude. “I’d love her until the end, and I wouldn’t cheat on her or anything like that. She needs to trust me, and also she needs to trust her own heart instead of holding back and waiting for some perfect man to come take her away from all of this. She’s got to stick with what’s the real deal.”

“And you, I take it, are the real deal?”

“Yeah, I’m the real deal. That’s why I’m here.”

She grinned knowingly and then began her lecture on Sylvia Plath. It all flew over Claude’s head as a flock of doves would. He could not arrest his fascination with her beauty: the beauty of her face when her cheeks flushed, or when she talked of love’s agony, love’s tender betrayals, love’s surprises, love’s enchantments, and finally love’s loss, and through it all he couldn’t find any other word than “love” to suit what he felt at the time for her. He could have listened to her for hours, just watching her as she wrote those strange, complicated terms on the board, words that were meaningless to him, because everything else was meaningless except that he should pursue her no matter what, her white-blonde skin giving him access to the celestial and all of its magnificent rewards, if only she would accept him as a supplicant.

And he imagined their new life together in the country, say Vermont on a farm with its verdant acreage, ski mountains, and dairy products, as they milk cows for their breakfast, hike together in the airy mountains during late morning, and dance together in the privacy of their living room when the sun disappeared. Their life would be majestic together if only she’d allow it, and who really cared what the rest of society thought? They would be rebels in the swarm of the banal, and sure she must have wanted a white man to complement her good looks, not a man fresh from the concrete jungle, but an upstanding young clone of the masses with little to say other than what his bank statement reported and what suit he planned to wear to work. Sure, that’s what all the white women wanted, a thoroughbred who delivered the easy life, and Claude guessed that he had to compete with these clones in order to win her, as there were many strong, able men for her to choose from.

Why choose him?

He tried answering this essential question, not only because his relationship with her depended on it, but also due to the philosophical complexity of it. Any world that would coerce Amanda Larson to choose a white clone was organized improperly, in his opinion. And he wasn’t exactly trading up. Why, he could have any woman he wanted, now that he thought about it. He recalled the many women he met in the poetry clubs and how they immediately wanted someone of his prestige and power to complement them, both whites and blacks alike. Amanda never saw him up on the stage, how ferociously uninhibited he could be, and she had never been with him behind closed doors either. He buried these things to learn of her ways, only her ways probably wouldn’t stick for long without her love thrown into the mix; he wondered how long it would take, so white she looked in front of the class, her white dress waving at her ankles, as she talked about what exactly? Oh yes, Sylvia Plath. How could he forget?

A spirited discussion followed her lecture, but Claude didn’t participate. He was more concerned with handing in his paper in exchange for taking her out someplace nice. The class discussed Daddy, one of Amanda’s favorite poems. Claude could only think about how disturbed this Plath woman must have been—a fascination with Nazis and how her father treated her like a poor Jewish girl. He hoped Amanda wasn’t the same way.

“You must have read her when you were down and out,” said Claude unexpectedly.

Amanda sighed.

“This poetry is not about me. The important thing is that you can identify with her pain, and most women can.”

“Men can too, but I feel she was too messed up with to begin with.”

She sighed again, and Claude knew he was out of line, but at the same time he couldn’t understand why Amanda was traveling the same route. Sylvia might as well have been a horror writer.

“There’s a complexity that you’re not investigating,” she said. “It’s not good enough to say that she’s messed up when you fail to examine how accurately she portrays loss and death, agitation and torment, disturbance and dream. So I would hesitate, Claude, before interpreting her poetry that way.”

He kept his mouth shut and let the class slide into an uncomfortable silence that only Plath could have written about. She dismissed the class shortly thereafter, and Claude stepped up to her desk with his manhandled paper rolled up in his hand.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said.

“What didn’t you mean?”

“About Plath.”

“It’s okay to disagree.”

“Yeah, but now you must think less of me.”

“I don’t think less of you, Claude. I just don’t agree with your interpretation. It’s not personal.”

“Then we can still go out?”

She sighed again as though annoyed with him.

“Am I really that much of a bother?”

“You’re not bothering me, Claude, but the fact that you think you’re a bother is a bother. That bothers me most.”

“I’d still like to take you out. Maybe we can get some dinner. I know a place Downtown.”

“I’m not so sure anymore if I want to immerse myself in your world.”

A pain shot through him just then. Call it the heart that pained him? And perhaps he lost hope then, that maybe they did belong in separate worlds, a cleaving, a butchering beyond compare to be separated like that. He didn’t know where it came from, why things had to separate. It made little sense to him, and yet somewhere within the folds of his imagination, he understood that sometimes people need to be separated from each other. Even though he loved Amanda, (yes, he loved her, he thought), such a relationship would never work. There would be, in his estimation, too deep a hole to dig, too big a mountain to climb if only to placate his stubborn, self-destructive soul.

“Besides, you’re too weak for a relationship with me. And you’re black, so why don’t you run on home.”