Yaccub's Curse

“I’m sorry you didn’t get into the program. I can’t believe you weren’t accepted. You’re one of the brightest students I’ve ever taught. If you want I could arrange for someone to tutor you on your fractions and long division and we could try it again in a couple of months?”

“Naw, don’t sweat it. I ain’t want to kick it with them computer geeks no way.”

“How is it that you can write such beautiful poetry and essays and speak so eloquently in the classroom and then speak like such a savage?”

“You’re supposed to speak all proper in class. I mean, I thought we was just being casual right now. You know, just talkin’ like friends.”

“I want you to talk to me like a friend, Malik. I just don’t understand why you can’t speak intelligently all the time. Why do you have to talk like the rest of those ignorant heathens when you’ve got more upstairs?”

“Because I’m one of those ignorant heathens. And when I leave here that’s what I go home to. And they ain’t the type that respects proper diction. Talking above them won’t win me any friends.”

“And talking beneath yourself will?”

“You know, when I’m at home my mom and my grandmom are constantly correcting my speech. They want to make sure that when I get older and go out on job interviews, or if I wind up at some Ivy League college or something, I won’t give the white man any excuse to think I’m any less intelligent than he is. She wants me to be able to enunciate and pontificate with the best of ’em. She even had me reading the dictionary. She heard some professor say that if you committed yourself to learning one new word a day you’d be one of the smartest people on earth in just a few years. I’m still in the Bs. Do you know what a Bete Noir is? Its literal translation is Black Beast and it means an adversary or something loathsome. I’ve got tons of useless words like that floating around in my head. When the hell do you think I’m ever going to use Bete Noir in conversation? But I learn all this shit to make my mom happy. Last year my grandmom took all my comic books away. You know what she has me reading now?”

“What?”

“Roots, African Genesis, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Song of Solomon, Native Son. She finishes reading a book and hands it right to me as if there was no difference between us and I read them from cover to cover. I don’t understand a lot of it, but she helps me. I keep a dictionary nearby too. It sometimes takes me months to finish one but I read them because that’s what my mom wants. I read those books before I read the junk you guys give us to read in here. I read them because I don’t want my Grandma to lose faith in me. She thinks I can be somebody some day.”

“That sounds great. It sounds like your grandmother is a very wise woman.”

“Yeah, but even though my mom and my grandmom know how smart I am my mom always tells me not to ever talk above my own people. You know why, Mrs. Greenblade? Do you know why she tells me that?”

“No. I honestly don’t”

“Because I don’t live in the world of books and poetry. I live in the damned ghetto and what good is language except to communicate? What good are fancy words that no one understands? I talk to you this way because this is what you understand. But I talk slang in the street because that’s the language they understand out there. My mom taught me that the dialects of the streets are just as complex and beautiful as the Queen’s English and that I should learn that language just as well as book language so that I can communicate with everyone. You see, Black folks have to live in two worlds, the world of Business and Academia, the White world, and the world of the streets. You feel me?”

“Yeah, Malik. I feel you. You mother is very wise and very right. Maybe I should take some of her advice myself huh?”

“Nah. If you ever said, Fo’ shizzle my nizzle, I think I’d die laughing. Either that or punch you right in the mouth.”

I turned to leave. Lunch had begun ten minutes ago and I was anxious to bully my way into the lunch line, eat, and hook up with Tank and Huey out in the yard.

“Malik?”

“Yes, Mrs. Greenblade?”

“Would it be alright if I passed you along some of the books I read?”

“Yeah, that would be cool.”

Mrs. Greenblade turned me on to some stuff that would change the way I looked at the world forever. Existentialism gave voice to many of the intuitions I’d had growing up. Intuitions that told me that maybe all this suffering was for nothing.

I read Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus. I read a play by Sartre called Nausea. I devoured Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund and Siddhartha. I was entranced by Dostoyevski’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man and the novel that had the most impact upon me, The Brothers Karamozov. I had never read anything like these novels. They were full of spite and cynicism, ranting tirades of existential angst. I know now that I wasn’t ready for it. I was overwhelmed and nearly devastated by the revelations these books brought me to. Desperate questions, blasphemies, whose answers only led to more questions. A snowball effect that caused a ricochet in my brain. Questions bouncing back and forth at increasing velocity and force until it felt like my mind would shatter. Why? Why? Why? Why? They turned my whole world upside down.

I read these books feverishly and each one pained me as much as it thrilled me. It was in a chapter of The Brothers Karamozov titled “Rebellion” that I received my most disturbing, and horrifying, enlightening. One of the novel’s main characters, Ivan Karamozov, issued the most powerful indictment of Christianity I had ever heard.

He described in graphic detail the suffering of a little girl who was abused by her parents and forced to sleep in an outhouse and a little boy who was torn apart by hunting dogs and he asked what kind of divine plan could rest on the suffering of little children? Ivan Karamozov wanted no part of such a plan. No eternal harmony was worth the suffering of innocents and any god who would allow such a thing was unjust. It was too high a price. “I prefer to live with my unavenged suffering and my unappeased anger…” he shouted, rather than accept what he deemed to be the “overpriced ticket” to paradise; rather than participate in the cruel plans of an unjust God.

I kept the book in my back pocket and read it over and over again. Not the entire book, just that one chapter, until the pages fell out of it.

I had always believed in the goodness of God even though everything in my experience spoke against it. Every horrible thing I’d witnessed in the hood flew in the face of faith and the idea of a wise and benevolent deity, but still I believed because that’s what I had been taught to do. I hadn’t even been aware that disbelief was an option. But now I knew. There were disbelievers and no lightning bolts had come down from the sky to smite them. I checked. A seed of doubt had been sown and even God’s very existence was now in question. Mrs. Greenblade may not have realized it, but by making me think and question my beliefs, exposing me to those self-tortured European authors and philosophers who seemed to believe in nothing, she might have corrupted me more than anything that had ever happened to me in the streets. Ironically, it was the words of a preacher at my Mom’s church that issued the most tragic wound to my faith.

I had started going to church with my mom and Grandmom after the incident in the lot. I can’t say I was making any heroic efforts to obey the commandments, not if it meant turning my back on my boys, but I was trying to make amends for the things I’d done and would do in the future through prayer.

I was wearing my best suit; soft gray, double-breasted, pinstriped, with a black tie and handkerchief. Over my mother’s objections I wore a small platinum crucifix in my left ear. We didn’t have a car at the time so we walked the seven and a half blocks to the massive two hundred year-old Baptist church. We lumbered along at a snail’s pace due to the premature arthritis in Grandma’s knees.

Grandma wore a huge purple hat with a big white bow that matched her purple and white dress. Mom was dressed in a form fitting blue dress that came all the way up to her neck, with an open back that went almost down to her ass. She had a black shawl wrapped around her to make her party dress look more respectable, but that didn’t save her from getting dirty looks from Grandma. Her head was adorned with a blue pillbox hat that matched her dress and she wore black heels and carried a matching black purse. As always, she was the prettiest one in the