GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD

By Jan Carew
Lawrence Hill Books (1994)
$14.95 155 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

In one sense, it does not much matter what type of man Malcolm X really was or what he actually believed. At the moment he died in a shower of assassins' bullets on the 21st day of February, 1965, Malcolm, like Lincoln in Edwin Stanton's memorable phrase, belonged no longer to himself, but to the ages. He lost his extraordinary ability to explain himself and became, merely, what we wanted him to be.

Oh, what we want Malcolm to be is powerful enough. For the most part, whether we are black or white, whether we liked him or not, our image of Malcolm X is essentially the same: a man of lightspeed-quick mind--enormously intelligent--wonderfully, colorfully articulate--accusatory finger jabbing the air--clipped phrases slicing their targets like D'Artagnan's sharp sword--African-America's racial conscience, scourging the "white devils" for their racism and hypocrisy--refined, immaculate, and yet, simultaneously, the epitome of the angry, trash-talking, in-your-face Black Man, poised on the knife's-edge of violence.

For many years after their deaths, as it was in life, Malcolm's image and influence in the African-American community was overshadowed by that of Martin Luther King. But in the violent, explosive 90's, selective parts of Malcolm's teachings have suddenly caught fire again. Young African-Americans, as if out of nowhere, have begun wearing "X" caps, using Malcolm's pictures in their movies and videos, and quoting certain of his words in their everyday conversations. In the wake of such events as the Rodney King beating, Malcolm's admonition that African-Americans should defend themselves against anti-Black violence has become increasingly popular--more popular, in fact, than it was when Malcolm originally said it.

As the attraction of Malcolm X appears to be growing rather than waning among young African-Americans (and as the country appears to be heading once more, hell-bent-for-leather, into one of its periodic, violent, cataclysmic confrontations along the racial fault line), it becomes more than a historian's idle curiosity to discover who this man called "X" was, what he believed, and the direction he thought America should take. The truth, or its distortion, could possibly have as much effect upon our future as it has had upon our past.

"Ghosts In Our Blood" is an attempt to fill in two huge gaps in our knowledge of Malcolm's life: first, in what political direction was he turning in the last months of his life?, and second, what were the roots of his Black Nationalist ideology? But Guyanan-born journalist and historian Jan Carew fails to deliver on his promises. "Ghosts" is part poor scholarship, part padded fluff, and part flight of the author's fancy. Still, one is left with the impression that with a little more time and effort by Mr. Carew, this book could have been quite valuable.

Carew held two days of private, intense talks with Malcolm in February of 1965 during Malcolm's last visit to England. Accounts of those talks, and of speeches Malcolm gave in England that month and in December of 1964, form the basis for much of "Ghosts."

If we could believe Carew, we could have invaluable insight into Malcolm's ideas little more than a week before his assassination. It would be an important revelation because in the last months of his life, Malcolm had strengthened his ties to newly-independent African nations, abandoned his view that white people were "devils," and was moving toward a broader view and critique of the racial situation in America and the African-American Freedom Struggle. Although these new ideas may have been fully-formed at the time of Malcolm's death, it is still unclear as to whether he got the chance to present them to the public.

But Carew is like the trial witness who gives his testimony in so much detail that one doubts its veracity. The account of the two conversations stretches over almost a hundred pages and is presented entirely as direct quotations, as if it were a verbatim transcript, and includes Malcolm's facial expressions, when he paused and the meaning of those pauses, when he got up and paced the floor, when he sat still and listened. Letting us know how these conversations were so faithfully reproduced 30 years after they took place would have helped the author's credibility.

If Carew runs into problems with presenting too much concerning his conversations with Malcolm, he has just the opposite problem with his search for Malcolm's roots: not nearly enough. He reports holding conversations with Malcolm's older brother, Wilfred Little, and an interview with Mistress Bessie Roumain, an elderly Afro-Caribbean woman who grew up with Malcolm's mother in Grenada. From this thin slice of research, Carew tries to round out our knowledge of Malcolm's family life and his early political influences.

It only works briefly, and tantalizingly. We learn a bit more about Malcolm's father, Earl Little, whose Black Nationalist teachings in the 1920's and early Depression years earned him the enmity of local whites intent on "keeping the niggers in their place." We gain some insight into the character of Malcolm's mother, Louise Langdon Little, the daughter of an interracial, out-of-wedlock union who kept her family together after the assassination of Malcolm's father, but who broke under the strain and was committed to a mental institution for many years. We learn more details about the relationship of the Little family to Marcus Garvey, Black Nationalism's greatest organizer, whose UNIA was the indirect forerunner of the Nation of Islam. This gives further credence to the belief that Malcolm was far more politically aware when he first came in contact with Elijah Muhammad's teachings than we have been previously led to believe.

And Carew's retelling of Wilfred Little's account of the death of Earl Little is both chilling and achingly poignant:

"We were living in Lansing at the time, and I'll always remember the night he was almost cut in half on the streetcar line. He had come home after a long day's work and was just about to settle in for the night when he announced that he was going back into town to get something he had forgotten. 'Don't go, Earlie,' my mother pleaded with him, 'I have a strange feeling that something bad could happen to you out there tonight.' ...[A] couple of hours later we heard a noise as if someone opened the front door, entered, and walked upstairs. 'Did you hear your father come in and go upstairs?' my mother asked. ...[B]ut when she went upstairs and checked, [my father] wasn't there. It wasn't too long after that that a state trooper came to the door..."

Perhaps because Carew has done so little primary research into Malcolm's family history, he is forced to include both the trivial (a page devoted to how Malcolm's brother got drunk for the first time) and the entirely irrelevant (the story of the migration of Carew's own relatives to the United States).

"Ghosts In Our Blood" is more a work-in-progress than a finished product. It ought to be completed...by Carew, or by anyone else who feels up the task. Understanding Malcolm X, and how he came to be the way he was, will go a long way toward helping us understand the facing off of the races in America in the 1990's.