White visitors drifted outside, obviously bored by the Liberation Library’s familiar titles. Once the last white person stepped to the street, the young woman at the table stood up and latched the door, locking in the eight blacks who remained. She walked to a section of the bookshelves, reached behind a row of works by Chester Himes — I heard a click — and that section of the shelf swung open into the outer room, as grandfather clocks do in old British movies set in haunted houses. I made an in-suck of breath, as startled as the other black visitors, for behind the tiny room in which we’d waited, there was a larger space, with huge colored maps of every major city in America on the walls, and five rows of folding chairs before a podium.
Yahya Zubena welcomed us inside.
“Matthew,” Amy whispered, “this isn’t what I expected at all. Isn’t he supposed to be in jail?”
“I read in Jet that he got out last year.”
“No one at work told me this was his library.”
Her reaction to him was visceral, the recoil any woman might feel in the presence of a man who, after his prison conversion, confessed in his books that he raped blacks as “practice,” as a warm-up to perfect his technique for whites in the suburbs. But we couldn’t leave. We were locked inside. I had to nudge Amy between her shoulder blades to coax her into entering the back room, but I was so dazed myself I don’t exactly remember walking in, only that Yahya said, “Now that the ofays are gone, we can get down to business.” He ordered us to follow him to a map of Chicago at our left. By any measure, he was a big man — linebacker big — with a Farmer Burns build, full-bearded, and a complexion one shade up from sepia. He wore faded jeans, work boots, and a dashiki of red, black, and green, the colors of Marcus Garvey’s flag. As large as he was, Yahya made the back room’s sparse furnishings feel as flimsy as constructions of pasteboard and papiermâché. In a word, he was one of the darlings of the white media, one of King’s competitors for press coverage, and every parole officer’s worst nightmare.
“Brothers and sisters,” intoned Yahya, “I want y’all to look at that map and tell me whereabouts you live.”
We all did so, indicating addresses in south and west Chicago. That pleased Yahya. He steered our group toward the map of Detroit. “If y’all got relatives there, show me where they live.” A few people pointed toward the heavily industrial portions of the city. Again Yahya smiled. He moved us on from map to map, from Oakland to Harlem, Cleveland to Philadelphia, and each time he asked, “Where do most black people live?” The answer unfailingly was in some urban district near factories and commerce.
“Now, I want y’all to sit down and listen carefully.” He waited until we were all seated on the folding chairs. “I took you through those maps because I wanted you to see for yourself that it ain’t no accident where we live forms a pattern. A concentration camp. We’ve always near highways or factories or warehouses or railroad tracks. Ain’t that so? You might say we’re contained. We’re concentrated in the areas where the Man wants us—away from him. Segregation did that, but from a strategic standpoint it did something else. What you think that is?” Fingers in his beard, he paced, sometimes pausing to stand directly over visitors in the front row where Amy and I sat, looming over us with his face only inches from ours. “I’ma tell you. Being concentrated like that means when y’all start rebelling against your miserable conditions, tearing up the city like you did a year ago, all Charlie’s got to do is move his tanks and trucks and National Guard troops right down the freeways and Illinois Central tracks to your front door.”
“Excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “What about blacks who don’t live there? Aren’t we a little more dispersed than these maps show?”
“I don’t think so, brother. Maybe you better look again, or clean them Coke-bottle glasses of yours.”
A couple behind Amy and me chuckled. The skin on my face tingled. “I was just asking if—”
Yahya scowled me into silence.
There was a pleat between Amy’s brows. “Why are you telling us this?”
“So you can prepare, sistuh.”
“For what?”
Yahya stepped toward her, so close we could smell him; he forced her to look up at him. I felt Amy stiffen. She placed her right hand on top of mine. “Why you think, girl? For the coming race war.”
“I don’t believe there is one coming, not if people of goodwill, white and black, do everything they can to make things better. Until a little while ago, I worked with Dr. King. Right now I work at Operation Breadbasket—”
Yahya grinned. “For King, huh? I guess we got some Uncle Tom nigguhs here. When the Revolution comes, y’all got to go.”
Now Amy was trembling. “You’d kill other black people?”
“Sistuh, I hate to say this, but you’n and that brother sound like house niggers to me. I don’t think you understand anything about the necessity of revolutionary violence. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me finish talking to the real black people in this room.”
Amy squeezed my hand so tightly I feared she might break the bones in my fingers. Witheringly, she gave me a sad, sideways look, as if to say, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I leaned back on my chair, wanting to leave but knowing we were Yahya Zubena’s captives until he finished. Against my will, I listened while he instructed the others on what to do when the white man came to get them, as Nazis had rounded up Jews in Poland thirty years before. Come they would, said Yahya. It was only a matter of time because blacks were asking for too much too quickly. “I’m telling y’all, the white man would rather blow it all up rather than give it up!” The evidence for this, he explained, was in the history books, where any fool could see that Caucasians were driven to conquest and oppression because they were “ice people” who came from cold European climates and subjugated ancient, peace-loving “sun people” everywhere in Africa. (Was I imagining this, or hadn’t the minister once said, “The Negro knows nothing of Africa, he is an American”?) He droned on and on, his descriptions of whites as Cainites and coloreds as Abelites fascinating to me, given the book I’d read on the train, and I thought of Chaym as he outlined his airtight, one-dimensional interpretation of history, one in which there was no room for ambiguity, or for counterexamples to his arguments, or for people like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or even Jackie Robinson. His historical vision was kitsch. Revolutionary kitsch. The way he reasoned, with racial politics as every syllogism’s major premise, led all his thoughts to the same terminus. (Of course, if the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s likely you’ll treat every problem — and person — as a nail.) I doubted his comparison of black communities to concentration camps, and his claim that Negroes could never be racist because, as Yahya said, “You can’t be racist unless you have power. Black folks don’t have power, so we can’t be racist.” It was the logic of Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,” and there in the Black People’s Liberation Library, I felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a Wonderland where all the world’s meanings were reversed. Yahya reminded me of the militant black students I met at Columbia College, dashiki-wearing radicals who, after I’d contradicted one of them at a meeting of the Black Student Union, told me I wasn’t black enough to belong to their group. They cast me out of their meetings. In response, I formed, then briefly led, the first Bible study group on campus for a year before my faith in the god of the Book began to fade. They (and Yahya) made me recall King, who warned, “There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored and anything noncolored is condemned.” And even more importantly, “We shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect.”